South Africa: The country's state of readiness for disaster following recent floods

By Minister Zweli Mkhize, Political head of the National Disaster Management Center

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.

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The state of readiness of the country is legally assured and institutionally modelled by the Disaster Management Act and its policy framework, the National Disaster Management Framework of 2005. This stems from the fact that the Disaster Management 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.

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To be successful, the approach to disaster risk management should be both multi-disciplinary and require multi-sectoral approaches to be successful. This is because the Disaster Management Act of 2002 only serves to coordinate disaster risk reduction measures while various sectoral pieces of legislation serve to mainstream disaster risk management in their daily programmes and projects, such as Water Services legislation, agricultural legislation, weather services legislation, human settlements legislation, roads and transport legislation, fire legislation and others.

There is a distinction between an incident and a disaster. An incident is any occurrence that is being 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 Disaster Management Act and declared as such in terms of section 27 as either a national, provincial or a local state of disaster.