PEDRO MZILENI | Poor planning leads to floods becoming neo-apartheid in SA

There is a consistent disaster of floods in SA and it is killing hundreds of people. The national media does not publicise these disasters enough because they occur in poor areas where black people live – and their consequences do not affect the country’s economy. This is usually how discourse is organised in South Africa. Issues receive national attention when they affect the upper-middle class and the international media is also arranged under the same pattern.

For the past 12 months there have been two major floods in the black areas of the country.

In January 2022, close to 20 people died in Mdantsane township and in Duncan Village near East London when floods swept informal settlements on the outskirts of the city. A grade 12 matric pupil, Yonela Pamla, was one of the people who died. Police captain, diver Pierre Marx, was another.

In June 2022, more than 460 people died in a flood in KwaZulu-Natal.There was massive damage to schools, clinics, community centres and basic infrastructure.People were moved to temporary shelters and community halls while the government was making alternative housing arrangements for them. Till this day, these people have not received any help from the government.

Many similar incidents, especially in remote villages, are never reported. These disasters are happening at consistent rates in SA largely due to changing weather patterns resulting from climate change. Temperatures are becoming extremely hot and the sea levels are also rising. As a result, when rainfall finally occurs, it hits hard.

A research study published in February 2022, by Lesley Allison, Matthew Palmer and Ivan Haigh, in the Environmental Research Communications journal, showed that the rises in South African sea levels are 7% to 14% higher than the global average. These revelations on their own show that SA is in the middle of a climate crisis and an urgent reduction in its gas emissions among other interventions is required.

Nevertheless, these major floods incidents that have hit SA in the past year have happened in the coastal area and they had three common threads:

• Black people were affected with a high number of deaths, loss of belongings and livelihoods plus displacements;

• It was mainly the informal settlements built on the outskirts of the city that were affected, and these also involved mining towns were cheap labour resides in the most precarious living conditions; and

• Government has been failing to assist victims with shelter and aid which highlights its gross unpreparedness to deal with disasters and post-disaster social responsibilities.

The causes behind these tragedies are twofold.

Firstly, South Africa remains an apartheid society. The provision of housing and land is still categorised according to race. White people own houses in the most developed areas of cities and their residential areas are located in the most safe and conducive parts of the land space. 

Black people, on the other hand, as the poor, unemployed and underemployed cheap labour, reside on the underdeveloped margins of the city. This continuity of colonial geographies and apartheid spatial relations confirms S’s identity today as being a neo-apartheid state.

Secondly, this neo-apartheid design handicaps government from driving transformative interventions that bring meaningful relief to affected black people. Every other disaster that occurs in SA ends up affecting black people as a result of how colonialism and apartheid were initially designed.

When SA became a democracy, it did not change these apartheid spatial relations. Instead, it continued with them by ensuring that quality public services and the building of newly integrated human settlements was not done adequately and drastically for black people, the victims of apartheid, and the majority of the population.

This structural problem, when compounded by the overall crisis of unemployment and inequality in SA, exacerbates racial inequality and keeps SA intact as a neo-apartheid society.

In this regard, with the climate change crisis being recently forecast by the 2023 Global Risk Report of the World Economic Forum as a leading cause of conflict, human devastation, poverty, displacement and rising living costs for the year ahead – it becomes a dangerous factor for a country like SA that still has underlying colonial questions to deal with.

Even worse, South Africa is the economic heart of Africa and challenges of this scale therefore can pose an existential risk for the global south if they are left unattended in major multilateral conversations.