by Munyaradzi Chenje
A landmark international conference on disaster management held in the South African financial capital, Johannesburg, highlighted the negative impacts of disasters on development in southern Africa.
About 400 delegates, who attended the two-day conference on February 29 – March I, 1996 with the theme, Disaster Management: Investment in the Future, heard that disasters are on the increase worldwide in terms of frequency, human toll and damage to property.
The situation is no different in southern Africa, a disaster-prone region frequently subjected to different forms of hazards and disasters. These include drought; floods; epidemics such as cholera, .dysentery and AIDS; crop diseases and pests; fires; storms and cyclones; and oil spills.
The most prominent of all these disasters in the region are droughts and floods both of which usually impact on large communities with devastating consequences. Droughts and floods, even localised to certain areas, often generate considerable publicity, galvanising governments into action to minimise deaths and property damage.
The situation is different with my AIDS whose impact is mainly felt at the family level, making it an almost insignificant issue despite that the pandemic has become as equally devastating as drought an or floods.
The common message in all the papers presented during the conference was that disasters, both natural and human-caused, retard development. Disasters not only destroy infrastructure but can cause the diversion funds allocated for development projects to fund relief programmes. The loss to southern Africa’s biological diversity due to disasters is largely unquantified. That loss has a bearing on development in southern Africa, negatively affecting such sectors as tourism.
Dr Olavi Elo, director of the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction (IDNDR) Secretariat who gave the keynote address, said disasters were not only on the increase worldwide but were now more violent, causing more losses of human lives and damage to property.
Statistics provided by Ken Westgate, director of Cranfield University’s Disaster Preparedness Centre, in the United Kingdom, show that between 1968- 1992, a total of 1,156 disasters were recorded on the African continent.
He said on average annually in Africa, 122,124 people are killed during disasters, 1,442 are injured, 14.83 million affected in one way or another and 193,980 left homeless. At the international level, more than three million people have been killed and about a billion have been affected worldwide by floods, earthquakes, landslides, tropical cyclones, volcanic and other natural disasters over the past two decades, says Dr Raymond Burby of the University of New Orleans.
“The economic consequences of disaster are equally devastating, not only in developed nations, but also in developing countries where losses as a percentage of gross national product (GNP) are 20 times greater and where an estimated 95 percent of disaster-related deaths occur,” he said.
Perhaps the most chilling statistics are those caused by HIV/AIDS, the most insidious disaster now stalking both young and old, in Africa’s urban and rural areas. Dr Lillian Kimani, senior lecturer at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa, says my infects about 500 people a day. “People talk about HIV/AIDS during the day and expose themselves to the HIV virus during the night,” she Said…
About 30 million adults and 10 million children will be infected with HIV by the turn of the century. More than 90 percent of them or about 27 million adults and nine million children will be Africans. “For Africa, the news is worse than bad,” said Dr Kimani, a Kenyan HIV and development consultant. “Sub-Saharan Africa has been the hardest hit region with over seven million adults and children infected since the start of the pandemic.” _
Dr Kimani already considers HIV/AIDS as a major disaster in sub-Saharan Africa. She says AIDS should be the major priority of all other disasters that have to be addressed by African governments. AIDS control and prevention is an emergency, said Dr Kimani, adding that some countries in Africa were already experiencing severe skills shortages as AIDS takes its toll on the workforce.
AIDS is exacting a heavy economic burden on governments, communities and individual households. According to the World Bank, more than 50 percent of the admissions to some African hospitals are now AIDS-related. In Zimbabwe, some reports say about 70 percent of the hospital admissions are AIDS-related. The direct costs of treatment have been estimated to range .rom 36- 200 percent of GNP in some countries.
Drought also places a heavy toll on the economy of any country affected. An Overseas Development- Institute (001) study of the impact of the 1991-92 drought of some economies of countries in the region, showed that Zimbabwe’s manufacturing output declined by 9.3 percent in 1992. Drought also caused a 25 percent reduction in the volume of manufacturing output, and a six percent decrease in foreign currency receipts. During the same period, the Zimbabwe Stock Market was identified by the International Finance Corporation as the worst performer of 54 world stock markets, with a decline of 62 percent.
In South Africa, a Reserve Bank of South Africa model indicated that the 1991-92 drought had a net negative effect of at least R1,200 million (US$315m) on the current account of the balance of payments. About 49,000 agricultural and 20,000 jobs in non-agricultural sectors were lost as a result of that drought, according to ODI researcher/authors, Charlotte Benson and Edward Clay.
Floods are also part of the region’s disaster profile Between 1911-88, South Africa alone suffered more than 180 serious floods – about one every five months. “In the 20 years before 1988, approximately 60 persons died in floods (in South Africa) each year,” said South African Water Affairs and Forestry Minister Kader Asmal. Since last Christmas (1995), more than 200 lives have been lost.”
In defining what constitutes a disaster, Prof Asmal said it is not enough to only consider the extent of loss of human life and economic impact. He said disasters are also the product of social, political and economic conditions, and the way that these determine the living conditions of certain groups of people.
He blamed “Dr Demonic Madness” and apartheid “social engineers” who forced hundreds of thousands of disadvantaged South Africans to settle in flood-prone areas. He said policies of the previous apartheid governments not only led to the increase of disaster potential in South Africa and perpetuation of a cycle of “disasters” but also to the racialisation Of disaster.
In highlighting the disaster fatality statistics in the region, the speakers also discussed some of the issues that impact on southern African governments’ ability to minimise the severity of disasters.
One expert said the major issues which have a bearing on disasters in southern Africa and how devastating they can be include; lack of critical data, technical know-how and financial resources, high population growth rate, poverty, debt repayment, environmental degradation, overexploitation of natural resources, and variability of rainfall both in terms of space and time.
With an estimated total population of more than 140 million people and an average three percent annual growth rate, southern Africa’s population is projected to double in just under 25 years. With increased population growth, there will be increased pressure to expand agriculture to grow more food, expand housing, expand industrial production, and build more infrastructure.
To meet the food needs of people, among other things, southern Africa not only has to bring forested or grazing land under cultivation but also to intensify irrigated production. Research shows that the clearing of vegetation may modify rainfall, not only leading to a drier climate in certain ecological zones but also increasing the risk of drought-related disasters.
Related to high population growth is mass poverty, which has been described as “one of the root causes of environmental degradation” in the region. Poverty and environmental degradation are linked in a vicious circle in which people cannot afford to take proper care of the environment. A degraded environment produces less, so people become more vulnerable to disasters.
More than half the population in southern Africa has no access to clean water, sanitation and health services, exposing the majority of the people to water-borne diseases: a disaster scourge in southern Africa. In South Africa, for example, between 12 million and 15 million people have no access to clean water.
Linked to poverty and environmental degradation, both of which expose the disadvantaged to the vagaries of disasters, is the issue of debt servicing for many of the countries in southern Africa. Foreign debt continues to climb, at least doubling in most countries in SADC between 1980-1993. In some cases, the debt burden increased by three or even six times during that period. For example, Lesotho’s external debt has increased by more than seven times since 1980 to US$0.512 billion in 1993.
Structural adjustment programmes, although widely touted as the answer to most economic problems of the region, have contributed to the increased vulnerability to disasters of both the urban and rural poor. Thousands of breadwinners who in the past could afford to maintain both urban and rural homes are now unemployed, increasing household vulnerability.
Dr Ailsa Holloway, a regional ‘advisor with the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies delegation in Harare, says communities which are economically or environmentally vulnerable due to limited or poor development are most vulnerable to disasters. For example, subsistence fanners eking out an existence in semi-arid areas are most vulnerable to the effects of ‘drought,
“The process of integrating disaster management with development is itself a gradual progression,” she said. “There are no shortcuts, no quick fixes.” Dr Holloway said while she does not subscribe to a fixed recipe for integrating disaster management, she however believes that disaster management is an inclusive — not exclusive — field, multidisciplinary and cooperative. It should also promote engagement and participation, improve research and information dissemination, and have organisational elasticity.
One speaker described mitigation – an aspect of disaster management – as “a bread and butter issue, and, therefore, a life and death issue”.
Dr Elo emphasised the need for countries to make the development of national capacity to deal with . disasters a priority. “We may know how to prevent a disaster,” he said, “but we may not have the capacity to implement (the necessary measures.”
While the conference did not pass any resolutions on any issue, it provided a forum for disaster management practitioners in southern Africa to discuss with their counterparts from other parts of the world issues of common interest. The conference also enabled the southern Africans to learn more About disasters in other parts of the world. (SARDC)
