The reality of a post-flood disaster in KwaZulu-Natal is an inevitability all of South Africa should start dealing with. The management of the disaster that befalls society is a public affairs management endeavor whose outcome redefines life, livelihoods, and their attendant faculties into posterity. The scope and reach of the flood-induced mayhem to core logistics routes of practically all South African economic nodes and destinations, its rapid human to economy relations disruptions, and how it has now made it difficult for a social compact determinative collaboration on dealing with its impact, makes it an unprecedented disaster of seismic regional proportions. As the flooding wreaks havoc on regional, national, and sub-National economies, the social fabric, and creates statewide or countrywide fear and uncertainty, it is at the same time establishing a new order of doing government and maybe disrupting our national logistics arrangements in respect of risk mitigation and enhancement of the system's resilience.
These realities are already changing public affairs as we know or knew them. Firms and Durban harbour-dependent sub-national and regional economies are experiencing convulsions out of which both a desire and compulsion for something new is now an inevitability. The containment, if not freezing, of economic activity by the immobilized flow of goods to and from the harbor, and as a result of both a compromised road and freight infrastructure, is sufficient enough to make one of the most expansive public infrastructure renewal programs in a Metropolitan municipality or district development node urgent. Patterns of South Africa's decades-old transport network as a sub-economy with its unique political economy, which needs to be insulated from its natural disruptive character is also an interruption to the flow of economics and thus capacity to generate revenues in all sectors. As the social balance of power gets tilted by efforts to save humanity from the impact of the disaster, the most consequential outcome of these efforts will be new governance paradigms and mechanisms to navigate a new KwaZulu Natal, if not the whole of the territory of South Africa, that is being born around us. The attendant public affairs dynamics will be consequential to almost all aspects of human government.
As the disaster is reordering how Durbanites and along N3 communities will be interacting with the world they live in, it will also demanding of the institutional arrangements that have been there to respond to a would-be post-flood disaster world. Although the existing South African architecture of government is experiencing intergovernmental tensions between spheres of government and intra-governmental rigidities amongst organs of state within a sphere of government, there is an emerging consensus that the KwaZulu-Natal disaster and its post-reconstruction require collaboratories whose consequential outcome will be new public financing and governance architectures. Within sub-national jurisdictions, this will be recalibrating to how public affairs and government are managed. In South Africa with well-documented evidence of the inequality gap between the rich and the poor, the disaster must have raffled policy failure feathers as the government would be grappling with socio-economic realities that could propel new trajectories of inequality.
As the repercussions of the disaster spread and generate various responses, institutions that have been holding and leading societies may fail to adapt to new conditions. The plummeting demand for goods and services because of inbound logistics mobility being restricted will collapse some business models and new ones will have to rise. Society will have new and faltering wills with growing and difficult to mitigate ambitions and pessimisms. As a new eThekwini is birthed out of crises, the timing of responses by humanity as both victim and survivor would procure the best of its resilient thinkers and actors. This will allow little to no time for prolonged responses to what the crisis would have done to the old governance architecture, but a demand for thinking that recognizes, and very fast, that a pre-flood KwaZulu-Natal is never coming back and efforts to resurrect it might be in vain.
As organs of state and other agencies of the state, including the private sector, curtail all other activities, the debate on the extent to which state intervention should regulate new activities may signal a resurgence of central planning, mainly because of its apparent success in democracies that reacted the same in the world, the best of such a case study is the Japanese reaction to a tsunami. The Japanese post-tsunami reconstruction success should however not be solely ascribed to its governance model but to the extent to which its citizenry trusts the government; this is mainly because the success of governmental social control depends more on voluntary compliance than on government enforcement, irrespective of how autocratic or otherwise that government may be.
The real-time character of the disaster as responses are meted out, will not only choke thinking about the long-term implications of policy responses but may also create a rapid coalescence of consensuses based on the public affairs exigencies. The determinants of health as codified by the World Health Organisation will during this period be foregrounded at the expense of other motives that had engulfed general human well-being and care. The disaster has stirred most of the determinants to a level where the political economy of human well-being and health may be firmly ringfenced more into the political than in service delivery. Paths to development may, and as a result of what the disaster would have exposed, henceforth have human well-being and health outcomes as a measure of good public policy.
As the true implications of the disaster unfold further and disintegrate immediate societies, a sense of disquiet about the future of Durbanites and along with N3 communities by the established individual-community-society-nation complex and its supporting institutional forms, the State and Government, will begin to color all optimism characteristic of advanced civilizations. The worry and hesitancy of people which has already manifested itself in the forms of panic buying, panic decision making, and a somewhat growing disbelief in the capacity of those in authority to contain the long term consequences of the disaster, will be defining to what the Durbanites and along the N3 corridor communities become beyond the disaster.
It is indisputable that the impact of the KwaZulu-Natal floods is unprecedented. Given that the unprecedented confounds understanding, it is expected that all societal lenses will illuminate the familiar which generally obscures the reality we are facing, thus turning unprecedented into an extension of a threatened past instead of a promise of the future. Responses will in this context be about the normalization of the abnormal, which might make the reconstruction and development tasks an uphill battle. Because every solution begins with careful knowledge of the nature of the new development context or problem, the logic of development planning might in the process become a liability to the exigencies of taking society out of the frustrations caused by the disaster. The time frames required to realistically come up with a multi-year horizon plan all point to the reality of it being found after its feared consequential outcome, a national recession, and thus constraining the requisite resources for post-disaster reconstruction consolidation. Containment measures will undoubtedly last for as long as the determinants of human well-being, welfare, and health are responding to the disaster management leveling inputs of government. Organs of State that will be first to get their service delivery areas out of the ‘containment pit’ should attract all resource investments and other already available relief grants and support, as others come on board. The response and impact of the flooding on society will thus be vast and diverse.
Convulsive as it is, the disaster has, in fact, assumed the status of a major innovation, and will thus result in established societal standards, norms, and practices shifting to become new frontiers of contestation; interests speaking. The disruptions in society that will come with the disaster, might result in interrupted hierarchies of command structures, most of whom are responsible for human governance, that came with interrupted hierarchies being treated not only with disdain but with a deliberate intent to usher in the new, or claim space for would-be post-disaster government; a beyond flooding politics and government reform challenge for South Africa.
Like the COVID19 pandemic, the impact of this disaster on how society will respond as voters to the governing party in eThekwini, provincial, and national spheres might be further defining to politics. The muted discontent about the numerical influence of the eThekwini region of the ANC on national conferences might be compromised by the exigencies of backyard realities that might defocus its already launched momentum towards the December 2022 ANC National Elective Conference. The impact of disasters on the political fortunes of the opposition complexes is recorded to be always to the disadvantage of governing incumbents, the rise of the individual in South Africa's electoral system might in eThekwini bolster the emergence of new leadership permutations leading up to the 2024 national elections, and the impactful rat and mice by-elections. Whilst the flooding alone will not cause the review of KZN's political mandating patterns, it may act as an accelerant of new forms of instability and/or conflicts, placing the burden to respond on an otherwise legitimacy compromised ANC-led governing centre. Given the historical track record of the ANC in the province with regards to co-existence with a political adversary, at best the province might also face some kind of administration paralysis, and at worst the fragility prone democracy might become unworkable and collapse.
The truer implications of the disaster to day-to-day living in KwaZulu-Natal will put to test the appetite of the post-November 2021 municipal elections minority that the ANC was rendered by a maze of anti- ANC coalitions to embrace the new conditions. The attendant differences in the political might be propelled by the truism associated the floods and the already visible challenges of decisiveness on and about what to do. Whilst the disaster will generate new interests, which are the currency of politics, the new contestations for KZNs political economy will be a great political existential issue, it will be how those in the province embrace their patriotic duty of ensuring the rapid reconstruction of all infrastructures which will make the difference.
Of course, the question is what next. The decision by President Ramaphosa to anchor the reconstruction of the South African Army, especially its infrastructure division, is encouraging. The response path that South Africa should take must be one that has a heightened security element within it. The time for an army let youth volunteer system might be ushered by this disaster. CUT!!!
🤷🏿♂️A ndzi voni mati ntsena, leswi swina makondlo inside!!!
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