SADC has failed to respond adequately to disasters
AS SOUTH Africa picks up the pieces and channels efforts towards rebuilding its floods-hit KwaZulu-Natal province, the regional organisation the SADC is nowhere to be seen.
In early 2021, SADC leaders instructed the organisation’s officials to create a natural disaster relief agency, to be called the Humanitarian and Emergency Operations Centre (SHOC) and headquartered in Nampula, Mozambique. The SHOC’s role would be to co-ordinate a regional response to natural disasters such as cyclones, flooding, and droughts.
Aside from the above, another (unspoken) reason for establishing the SHOC is to overhaul the existing SADC natural disaster response mechanism, which has proven exceedingly ineffective.
As the phenomenon of climate change becomes increasingly real, SADC countries like Madagascar, Mozambique and South Africa have experienced occasional extreme weather, claiming hundreds of lives and leaving devastating impacts behind.
Droughts and floods have occurred with alarming frequency and increased destructiveness in the region since 2000, pointing to a situation of climate change.
While the AU donated about R2.3 million to humanitarian relief efforts in the flood-battered KZN, the SADC has yet to provide relief aid.
South Africa is not the only country that is becoming more vulnerable to adverse weather due to climate change. Mozambique has experienced a recurrence of devastating storms and flooding emanating from cyclones, with many people killed in 2019, 2021 and 2022. In 2021, the Mozambican President, Filipe Nyusi,noted that the country had lost over $150 million (about R2.5 billion) to these weather disasters.
Equally, Malawi and Zimbabwe have been severely affected by cyclones in the recent past, impacting hundreds of thousands of people.
In fact, these natural disasters have the propensity of wreaking havoc in more than one country once they strike in the region.
The effects of natural disasters are often wide-ranging and heart-wrenchingly catastrophic. On the one hand, droughts destroy crops and livestock, curtailing harvest, and usually last for a succession of years.
As the supply of food becomes unstable as a result of the scarcity generated by droughts, the prices of foodstuffs inevitably skyrocket. Obviously, this creates a food security crisis, and in certain circumstances, famine and malnutrition may follow.
On the other hand, floods wipe out social and economic infrastructure, destroying homes, roads and even commercial entities; the damage in this category in KZN is estimated at about R20bn
. People are also killed in the process, as was the case in KZN, where more than 400 people perished in the April 2022 flooding.
This makes the SHOC a crucial initiative since the recurrent disasters necessitate a co-ordinated response from a regional level. Civil society organisations (CSOs) should be an integral part of this SADC initiative, given their intimate involvement with the grass roots.
The role that the SHOC can fulfil becomes even more urgent and pivotal, considering that governments appear unable to respond with the requisite swiftness and effectiveness. In the absence of an efficacious response from the SADC and governments, vulnerable people are looking to CSOs to fill the void.
Specifically, this was demonstrated in the amount of faith afforded to these organisations by the affected people in response to the KZN floods; for instance, the Gift of the Givers facilitated streams of donations from several sources that trusted the organisation to assist those devastated by the floods.
However, this involvement does not absolve the SADC and governments of their responsibility to take the lead in managing natural disasters. Instead, the SADC, governments and CSOs should work together, and by so doing, the positive cumulative impact of their intervention will multiply.
As people are increasingly losing faith in government institutions, working with these organisations will be in the best interest of the SADC and governments in restoring this faith.
But with some countries in the region so poor that a significant share of their national budgets is financed by foreign donors, the SHOC would be an important mechanism for responding to natural disasters, with costs of operation carried at the regional level and not the domestic level.