State of read iness in crisis

Disaster risk management is everyone’s business, writes Dr Mmaphaka Tau

THE RECENT floods and attendant hardships that befell our compatriots have triggered a number of questions and enquiries about the country’s state of readiness to deal with disasters and other unforeseen events that bring scores of deaths and massive damage to infrastructure.

The quick answer is that we are ready to deal with unforeseen events of this nature to the extent that is humanly possible and in keeping with our constitutional mandate to protect the rights of everyone in South Africa.

The Bill of Rights superficially spells out how various rights should be protected.

Section 24 of the Constitution specifically guarantees every citizen the right to an environment that is not harmful to their health and wellbeing, and the need to ensure that the environment is protected for the benefit of present and future generations through reasonable legislative and other measures.

The Disaster Management Act 2002 (Act 57 of 2002) was put together to ensure the realisation of this constitutional imperative.

Notable is that the Act is founded on the need to ensure prevention, preparedness, mitigation of disasters and emergency response in the face of threatening disasters.

The country’s state of readiness is legally assured and institutionally modelled by the Act and its policy framework, the National Disaster Management Framework of 2005.

This stems from the fact that the Act calls for the establishment of disaster management centres at provincial and municipal levels as well as the integration of disaster risk management within the institutional arrangements of all relevant sector departments and other role players.

With the institutional arrangements and various resources set aside for disaster management, the country is able to implement prevention and mitigation measures as well as an emergency response in the face of various incidents and disasters.

However, the success of the measures depends on the extent to which every member of society makes efforts to avoid risk and reduce existing risks in their areas of existence.

This is because the government cannot be everywhere, hence the need to reduce risk as Disaster Risk Management is everyone’s business.

To be successful, the approach to disaster risk management should be multidisciplinary and it requires a multisectoral approach.

This is because the Act serves only to co-ordinate disaster risk reduction measures while various sectoral pieces of legislation serve to mainstream disaster risk management in their daily programmes and projects.

For instance this refers to, water, agricultural, weather services legislations and every legislation that concerns human settlements, roads and transport as well as fire.

It should also be noted that there is a distinct difference between an incident and a disaster.

An incident can be summed up as any occurrence that is managed but has not been classified and declared as a disaster.

A disaster, on the one hand, is an occurrence which exceeds the capacity of a particular institution to manage, using its own resources and which has been classified as a disaster under section 23 of the Act and declared as such in terms of section 27 as either a national, provincial or a local state of disaster.

One of the questions that is often raised pertains to funding after a disaster has been declared.

First, the act requires that once an occurrence has befallen a particular area, the municipality as well as relevant sector departments must activate their contingency plans and funds to deal with such an occurrence.

Once their resources have been depleted and their national sector departments do not have funds, they can declare the state of disaster as stated above in order to access emergency grants from the National Disaster Management Centre.

The NDMC will then verify the costs and allocate funds to the relevant sector department responsible for the affected service. For examples, when roads are affected, the NDMC will consult the Department of Roads and Transport in order to calculate costs that might be needed by that particular sector.

This also applies to school infrastructure where the Department of Education would be involved, health facilities to the Department of Health and houses to the Department of Human Settlements and so forth.

The heads of the departments would be accountable for the effective spending and reporting on expenditure.

Yes, the Act is clear on the need to give priority to prevention, mitigation and preparedness while also making room for response and recovery.

This means that disaster management plans must be part of the municipal Integrated Development Plans as per the provisions of the Municipal Systems Act 2000 (Act 32 of 2000).

However, what is required now as South Africa faces challenges of floods is a culture of risk avoidance across society as everyone has a role to play.