Southern Africa
Need to review disaster management in Southern Africa

afrol News / SARDC, 9 May - As southern Africa has experienced another devastating bout of floods, questions are being asked as whether the disaster management strategies being used by the regional governments ought to be overhauled.

Coming hard on the heals of two serious floods in the past successive seasons, the current season has left hundreds of thousands homeless and in need of food aid and shelter. This means for the coming few years many in southern Africa will require assistance to restock their food and livestock while rebuilding their homesteads. This is in a region where the majority of the population was already languishing in poverty.

Complains have been raised already that some of these people ignore early warnings by civil protection authorities, hoping to sit out the floods being caused by rising waters resulting from incessant rains in already waterlogged areas.

Some critics however have attributed this to the lack of trust of the local people in their meteorological stations which have often been accused of inaccuracies in their whether predictions.

A case in point is the announcement by the meteorological services in Zimbabwe in early March that some parts of the country were going to experience heavy torrential rains, with possible flooding in a period of 10 days. These rains were not experienced to the extent that had been predicted leading some to quickly point fingers. 

The truth however was that there were torrential rains but not as heavy; there was weather activity in the Mozambique channel which caused all the stir and this in fact turned into a cyclone, making the issuance of an early warning necessary.

Despite a revision of the SADC Protocol on Shared Watercourse Systems, shared rivers have proven to be tricky in disaster management. Mozambique has become a victim of its neighbours' actions. Every time Zambia and Zimbabwe agree to open the floodgates of the Kariba dam along the Zambezi River during such a wet season, Mozambique's Tete province has suffered as a the river swells and burst its banks.

Weather experts at the Southern Africa Region Climate Outlook Forum (SARCOF) in Botswana predicted normal to above normal rainfall for most parts of the SADC region during the period October 2000 to March 2001.

True to SARCOF's prediction, there was below normal rainfall in northern Tanzania; above normal rainfall in Angloa, central Zambia, Zimbabwe, South Africa, central and southern Mozambique, much of Botswana and Namibia, Malawi, Lesotho, Mauritius, Swaziland and southern Tanzania.

Following two wet seasons and unprecedented flooding in the eastern and south-eastern countries of the region namely Botswana, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe, flooding was experienced again in these low-lying areas where the water tables are high and soils were already saturated.

REWU predicts that only three countries, namely Malawi, South Africa and Zambia will have an overall cereal surplus during the 2000/2001 marketing year. The rest of the countries face overall cereal deficits ranging from 109,000 tonnes in Swaziland to about 1.17 million tonnes in Tanzania.

Hit by recurrent floods, southern Africa needs to reorganise its disaster management and early warning institutions and mechanisms to effectively deal with the disasters ravaging the region.

A harmonisation of mechanisms by countries sharing watercourses is necessary to curb flooding which can be averted by joint water management.

The need to foster trust in national weather services is urgent and governments can best work on it through intensive public awareness programmes and community involvement in some of discussions on disaster management.

by Tinashe Madava, SARDC

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