KwaZulu-Natal is teaching its residents, and the country, that government cannot be relied upon, and true help comes from the private sector.
It is a painful lesson to learn, but learn it we must. The government is incapable of maintaining the peace, protecting private property, conducting basic infrastructure maintenance, preparing for and responding to disasters…. Let me rephrase: government is incapable.
It is also rotten to the core. Corrupt. Crooked. Unethical. Unscrupulous. Untrustworthy. Venal. Base. Bent. Tainted. Unprincipled.
Nothing demonstrated that better than the tragic floods in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) this month.
Provincial premier Sihle Zikalala led from the front, upholding the grand image of entitled ANC elitism.
While the people were thirsty, he shamelessly claimed a water tanker for himself. Then his office lied about it, saying that the video footage was doctored. Then it lied again, saying that it was merely on its way to deliver water elsewhere.
Finally, he was forced to say sorry, much in the way a teenage bully is made to say sorry. He didn’t mean it, and sorry doesn’t cut it.
One of the excuses he concocted after the fact stuck, and apparently calmed outraged residents.
One can only agree with EFF leader Julius Malema, however, when he told the media: ‘It was not for the first time. We saw it during Covid-19. It is not only Sihle [Zikalala]. They all do that. The call for him to step down is an honourable thing. When a national disaster has been declared, someone abusing powers must step down. Sihle is a failure and a thief. He steals our people’s water.’
Stealing relief money, diverting material aid, and failing to perform basic duties are not aberrations in ANC governments that merely require vigilant oversight and prosecution when they happen. They are how government operates. They are business as usual. They occur openly, without shame. They are expected.
Distrust in government
‘No trust in SA government: KZN flood aid commitment met with cynicism & derision’, read the headline on an article by Stephen Grootes in Daily Maverick last Tuesday.
‘As many people from many corners of our society rush to help the victims of the immense and horrifying flooding in KwaZulu-Natal, the government has promised to help the province and to make financial resources available,’ he wrote. ‘Instead of gratitude, they were met with an overwhelming amount of cynicism. It turns out that most people believe this money will simply be stolen.’
Even the Treasury, he added, has proposed appointing an independent agency to manage relief funds, in a tacit admission that it, too, believes the relief funds will otherwise be embezzled.
Grootes warns of the implications of this public distrust for both the ANC’s election hopes and for the rule of law more generally.
He does, however, believe that distrust in government is not a natural condition, and that trust can be restored, although he doesn’t elaborate on how exactly an ANC government would go about doing that.
A day later, he penned another piece, describing as ‘a stunning reversal’ the observation that ‘the ANC [is] now guilty until proven innocent’.
In it, he appears to relieve the ANC of responsibility over the KZN floods: ‘This would not be the first time a political party in government has been blamed for a natural disaster. As we have already seen during the pandemic, our government and others have been blamed for events beyond their control. In some cases, this may well lead to governments being voted out of power, even if they did nothing wrong.’
The ANC did nothing wrong. Right…
‘Natural’ disaster
The cut-off low pressure system that dumped hundreds of millimetres of rain over KZN was, of course, natural. It wasn’t particularly out of the ordinary, either.
The ocean off the KZN coast is the most common location in the world for the formation of cut-off low pressure systems. Cut-off lows have caused major flooding in KZN (or Natal) before, most notably in 1987, when the death toll, as a proportion of the population at the time, was much higher than it was this year.
KZN is also vulnerable to tropical and sub-tropical cyclone systems, notably in 1984, when two systems a mere three weeks apart – Domoina and Imboa – battered the region, causing widespread death and destruction.
Storms and flooding are common in KZN, and we’re always being told they’ll become more frequent and more severe. Shouldn’t the government help people prepare accordingly?
Dewald van Niekerk, a professor in geography and the director of the African Centre for Disaster Studies at the North-West University, wrote an excellent article for News24.
‘Blaming nature is a convenient way of absconding (sic) any responsibility,’ he wrote (presumably meaning ‘abdicating’).
‘Such a belief shows a very narrow understanding of how disasters and disaster risks are created, and it leaves us powerless in the face of increasing natural phenomena.’
He links to an interesting website entitled No Natural Disasters, which argues that disasters are always the consequence of how people and governments respond to natural hazards, and are therefore never ‘natural’.
Equally powerful natural hazards – be they storms, earthquakes or droughts – affect different societies differently, depending on how well prepared they are to withstand such events and how efficient their response is when they occur.
The same storm that causes thousands of deaths on Caribbean islands, for example, might cause no or very few deaths on the US mainland. This is entirely a function of better building codes, better advance warning systems, better public infrastructure such as storm water drainage, better emergency services, and better emergency relief management.
The extent to which a natural hazard becomes a ‘disaster’ is almost entirely due to human factors.
KZN preparedness
This puts the notion that the KZN and eThekwini governments were victims of an unfortunate ‘natural disaster’ into an entirely new perspective.
How many lives would have been saved had storm water drainage systems been adequately built, and frequently maintained, and if there hadn’t been so much uncollected solid waste to flush into storm water drains, blocking them and forcing the water to find alternative routes to the ocean?
It isn’t like this is a new issue. The impact of solid waste and litter on storm water drainage was researched in 2000, and again in 2007. Complaints that flood-damaged storm water drains went unrepaired in KZN go back to 2016.
How many lives would have been saved had the government been able to prevent people from building in steep ravines or on flood plains? Again, this is not a new problem.
How many lives would have been saved had government delivered on its promises of building decent houses for the poor?
How many lives would have been saved if, instead of predicting 40mm of rain, the South African Weather Service had recognised the danger and warned of major flooding? Or if it wasn’t so risky to make private weather predictions that, if they turn out to be incorrect, could land you with a R5 million fine or five years in prison?
As Paddy Harper wrote for the Mail & Guardian, this was a disaster waiting to happen. He added, wittily, that the prayer services should have said: ‘Deliver us from our own handiwork.’
He also wonders what the vaunted (and expensive) Cuban water engineers have been up to, and why their communist prowess does not appear to have made any impact on either the preparedness for or response to the floods.
Private responses
On 20 April, fully 12 days after the rains and floods began, the South African National Defence Force said that the first 400 of an expected 10 000 troops had arrived in KZN to help with emergency, relief and reconstruction operations.
It took government almost two weeks to go through the motions of declaring first provincial and then national states of disaster, and finally getting a handful of boots on the ground.
Contrast this with private companies and non-governmental organisations (NGOs), who were on the spot as soon as funds and people could be mobilised.
A week before the army turned up, Daily Maverick already had a long list of organisations, from supermarkets to Gift of the Givers, that were out there doing the heavy lifting that government was not doing. They called the list ‘just a sample’.
‘Damn! Why is civil society so hot?’ exclaimed News24 opinions editor Vanessa Banton.
The effectiveness of private relief and aid stood in such stark contrast to the corruption and incompetence of the local and provincial governments that the politicians actually got embarrassed, and went on the attack.
The KZN provincial government spokesperson, Lennox Mabasa, went into full slander mode, declaring that NGOs helping communities deal with the flooding are ‘part of a corrupt enterprise, aided and abetted by the media in an effort to sully the efforts of government’.
He didn’t deny that government is corrupt, but says that we only know that because there are investigating agencies, according to Daily Maverick. By contrast, he accused NGOs of widespread corruption, without providing an iota of evidence to support this grave allegation.
The psychology at work here is elementary. Because nobody trusts the ANC government, ANC flunkies deflect, lash out, and try to paint the private sector actors who actually do deliver services as the true villains.
Meanwhile, eThekwini municipal officials descended upon Virginia Airport and hijacked a load of private donations intended for emergency workers, supposedly because the airport was not an ‘authorised’ location for emergency relief.
They didn’t even wait to be out of sight of witnesses before ripping open the care packages and stuffing their greedy faces with chocolate bars.
Two options
The sorry tale of government failure leading up to and responding to the catastrophic floods in KZN, while the private sector has been widely hailed as saviours, could lead to two conclusions.
One is that the ANC government must go, and be replaced by a government that is capable of foresight, maintains infrastructure, delivers services especially to the poor, has effective disaster response plans for when the inevitable happens, and is largely honest and accountable to the people.
The other is that government in and of itself is the problem, and citizens would be better off relying on their own private companies, associations, and charities for security and disaster relief.
As a libertarian, I lean strongly towards the latter conclusion. Notably, even some Ramaphorians in the media are beginning to agree.
As the thoroughly left-wing Rebecca Davis wrote after last year’s uncontrolled riots, which also happened in KZN: ‘The events of the past week have caused even the likes of me, who previously did not have a libertarian bone in her body, to ponder the question: What, actually, is the point of a government?’
While the ANC governs where it does, citizens have been put on notice: you’re on your own.
Perhaps we should settle for a middle ground: elect a new government that is capable of delivering basic services – doing little, but doing it well – while leaving space for self-reliant communities and a vibrant, growing and multifaceted private sector that fulfils the majority of our wants and needs.
If that’s the lesson the KZN flood disaster can teach us, perhaps we’ll emerge not stronger, but wiser.
[Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/governmentza/52003864659/]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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