City urged to discuss flood assistance with residents

OPPOSITION party councillors have called on the eThekwini Municipality to communicate clearly with residents who have been affected by the recent floods on the type of assistance they can expect from it in rebuilding their homes.

DA councillor Warren Burne warned recently during council meetings that there was already an expectation from the public that the municipality was going to step in and help following the traumatic flooding disaster.

His warning follows one issued by councillors at Executive Committee level who said the municipality should take some of the blame for the magnitude of the disaster as its infrastructure had failed, exacerbating a bad situation.

They called on the municipality to step in and assist private residents, who would normally not qualify for such assistance.

The floods devastated many parts of the city. Close to 400 people were killed, and thousands of homes were destroyed or partially damaged, and thousands of people have been left destitute.

“I would like to go back to the caution that I have been making for the last three months that we have already been spending the General Insurance Fund monies for the daily operations of the municipality, and I have been saying that a calamity might happen and we will need every cent, and that calamity has now happened.

“That is bad enough, but what is going to make it worse is the fact that there are now expectations that are rising in the community that the municipality is going to step in and fix everything,” said Burne.

“My request to the municipality is to grab the issue regarding expectations and put out some information to the community as to what they can expect.”

Patrick Pillay of the Democratic Liberal Congress (DLC) said his office had received a lot of questions from many private home owners whose properties had been damaged.

“Some of these people require assistance in stabilising their property. The municipal infrastructure was washed away, creating soil erosion that left their properties unstable, and many of these people do not have insurance.”

He said that they believed that the municipality should step in and assist indigent private home owners, just as it would assist residents that were living in RDP houses.

Deputy mayor of eThekwini, Philani Mavundla, who also chairs the infrastructure committee, said the focus now was on the restoration of infrastructure. He said any discussions about rebuilding or repairing private homes fell outside his purview.