by Keaoleboga Dipogiso
There is no nation immunized from potential danger of natural disasters, be they floods, storms, winds, famine, war, fires etc. However the most critical component is disaster management and risk reduction stratagem with ends to avert deterioration into social unrest and depletion of decency of the population. We have in the 90s experienced floods which caused serious damage to property due to lack of proper physical planning and land management. A Botswana Country Report Submitted to the African Regional Consultations on Disaster Reduction Workshop, June 2-3, 2004 Midrand, South Africa reveal that the “1999/2000 floods were the worst in living memory”. The said floods ravaged almost all administrative districts across the entire country. The report continues to reveal that these floods caused loss of life and extensive damage to infrastructure, public and private assets, environment and disrupted normal family life. These historic floods were tragic taking thirteen lives. It is revealed further that over seventeen thousand structures were wrecked and displacement of thousands of people was experienced. Crops and livestock were not spared. Road, bridges and rail infrastructure were desolated. The report doesn’t elucidate on the value of economic liability incurred in the process of those floods.
We continue to experience in the recent past flooding that enmeshes property in ponds, destroys infrastructure and subverts lives in virtually every part of the country. There is however less information on how this causes a state of upset and volatility with the potential to stall proper functioning of society both at individual, collective and economic levels. This arguably defines how the character of our society as mentioned in the introduction above is also embodied in the polity of our government – slack and carefree. We are architects of this misfortune because we too are a happy-go-lucky nation.
There is at least commendable efforts by individual scholars who attempted to put this topic on our public agenda as recommended by various strategies for global action to minimise risk. Few as they are these individuals have attempted to unpack our risk response strategies as a country and recommended to policy makers, workable internationally acclaimed interventions on the topic. Maripe and Sikamba (2014) articulated extensively on this matter though theirs was mainly focused on the issue of equipping social workers with proper expertise to deal with catastrophes. They argue mainly from a social work perspective of addressing this and obviously it is limited to ‘post disaster’ than a rather ‘mitigation’ or ‘preventative’ perspectives. This means developing effective policy measures to direct interventions that mitigate deterioration of risk during disaster. It involves ensuring that critical public services such as health continue unabated during crises.
Other critical aspects are physical planning to ensure developments and land use are carried out in a risk sensitive manner and inevitably community mobilisation on effective risk reduction.
It is worth noting that they point to the imperative of setting up a disaster reduction centre with the University of Botswana to train social workers and equip them with technical necessities to assist themselves and others in disaster situations. They also point to the critical need for mainstreaming disaster risk management to social work curricula. This is not enough but could be a vital step in the broader direction of mainstreaming reduction of risk into the policy making processes and address it as an essential service without which the nation may repeatedly succumb to disasters of the same sort.
Maripe and Sikambe studied the United Nations statistics that revealed that economic costs of disasters have been increasing over decades. It is also expounded that global disaster economic losses in 2008 were US$178 billion which is a compared to the average annual record of US $85 billion for the era of 2000-2007. In terms of global human loss 235,816 people were killed by natural disasters in 2008, triple the annual average of 66,812 for 2000-2007. Recently The World Bank, on the other hand revealed an astonishing increase in the same statistics. It shared that the global economy suffers a whooping USD520billion due to various disasters which throw about 26 million persons into poverty each year.
This economic losses are a significant cause for global action towards consolidation of strategies to mitigate the effects of natural calamities. This should be a lesson for our dear Botswana to start taking disasters with the seriousness they deserve. Based on the arguments raised in the Maripe – Sikambe paper this the country does not seem to have enough intellectual capacity to indulge in planning, policy formulation and communal action that sensitizes the public in general about the risk reduction conundrum. It also does not have an effective institutional framework of addressing the problem. Maripe and Maundeni provide significant case for a system that plans to fail.
They argue that risk reduction and disaster preparedness should be the responsibility of every institution, individuals, communities and not only government. This is an assertion which flops in terms of differentiation of levels of responsibility and roles clarity. The individual is responsible for their own safety, but such responsibility is untenable in situations of crises sometimes perpetuated by government’s failure to plan and act accurately. Individuals may panic out of shock but the imperative of professional institutional emergency assistance cannot be over-emphasised. Establishment of such should be preceded by progressive policy framework that weighs disaster as one of major government priorities. It is very important to note that these are catastrophes that suck of out the collective being of communities, most of the times leaving them in paralysis and pushed against the wall. Therefore the state has to rise to the occasion and play a leading role in risk reduction and disaster preparedness.