If there was one report that should keep South Africans awake at night, it’s Auditor-General Tsakani Maluleke’s alarming findings pointing not only to incompetence but lack of care in the provincial government’s response to the devastating floods in KwaZulu-Natal and parts of the Eastern Cape last April.
It reads like a script from a horror movie or a never-ending nightmare about dead people, and others with invalid ID numbers, emerging as beneficiaries of disaster relief aid in eThekwini Municipality.
While this sounds like something we have heard about before, especially within the South African Social Security Agency at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, little to no change has taken place, judging by Maluleke’s findings.
But perhaps more concerning was the fact that KZN had spent less than a tenth of its allocation, raising concern over the provincial government’s sense of urgency when there is a crisis in affected communities.
Out of the R5.8 billion that had been committed, the KZN government had spent a mere R251 million, which is equivalent to 4%, by May 31.
Maluleke remarked: “The overall message (of the assessment) is that there is still a slow response to the disaster. From the impact assessment to the delivery of service or the actual implementation of the relief effort, there is still a great deal of time between those two activities.”
If anything, this kind of shambolic response is a spit on the graves of the 459 people who lost their lives during what researchers have described as catastrophic.
It points to a lack of respect to those who are missing and presumed dead and rubs salt in the wounds of the 40 000 people left homeless by the disaster. No government priding itself on being “for the people” would ever respond in such a manner to a disaster that destroyed more than 4 000 homes.
What this shows is that no crisis can ever shake the crop of leaders we put in power to get things done.
If they cannot get it right, even when so many people’s lives are lost, then there is no hope that they will ever get it right.
We hope the thousands of Western Cape residents affected by the devastating floods in the past week will not meet the same fate.
Cape Times