As the floodwaters recede in Limpopo and parts of Mpumalanga this week, a familiar and hollow ritual is unfolding. In the legal lexicon of South Africa, a “national state of disaster” is a tool meant for the extraordinary; the sudden floods or the acute crisis. Yet for the majority of South Africans, the state of disaster is not an event, it is a permanent address.
As we witness the government’s penchant for invoking the Disaster Management Act in response to everything from gender-based violence (GBV) to the recent devastation in our northern provinces, we must ask: For whom are these declarations intended? The reality is that for the majority of our citizens, the “disaster” is a chronic condition characterised by the crushing weight of poverty, structural inequality and a 32,1% unemployment rate that robs individuals of their dignity every day. Declaring a state of disaster in terms of the Disaster Management Act has increasingly become a performative gesture.
It suggests a sudden rupture in an otherwise functional system. However, my research in disaster management and environmental social work proves the opposite. Disasters do not create vulnerability; they merely peel back the skin to reveal the pre-existing “daily disaster” under which our communities labour.
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Take, for instance, the 2022 KZN floods. While the cameras have long since moved on, the “daily” disaster persists in KZN, with some people still residing with relatives. Additionally, the infrastructure remains broken, and many families’ lives never went back to where they were [not that it was good where they were, but their reality has deteriorated even further].
In KZN during 2022 floods, the declaration of a state of disaster did not accelerate dignity, instead, it served as a gateway for the opportunistic looting of funds. We saw it during the Covid-19 pandemic, where the procurement of PPE (personal protective equipment) became a feeding frenzy for the politically connected, and we see it again in the sluggish, corruption-riddled recovery efforts following climate events.
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