The country has just survived a
rainstorm which lasted over four days continuously from Saturday the 10th
January to Monday the 13th January 2015. The rains and the downpour
offered a litmus test to the nation’s disaster preparedness strategy, and stretched
the government disaster reduction policies to their limits. What sounded odd
with the natural disaster is that failure for the meteorological department to
alert the masses living in low laying areas of the pending disaster. However,
as it is always too difficult to predict mother nature, especially when she is
about to unleash her wrath, we would be naive to cast out blame on our poorly
equipped meteorological department to do a job too difficult for them. I would
like to make a post-mortem analysis of the Malawi Flood and make suggestions on
how we ought to have prepared for the disaster.
Firstly, let me state the gravity
of the Malawi Flood. The rains had been hitting the whole country, with the
worst hit districts in the Southern Region, such as Nsanje, Chikwawa, Blantyre,
Mulanje, Phalombe and Zomba. Information had started flooding the social media
on the volume of catastrophes these hard-hitting never-ending downpours were
having on our infrastructure. Such information could be relying on or not, as
social media is capable of misleading the masses. The rains persistence and
tenacity had me believe it was a hurricane, or some kind of a hurricane, which
are usually called cyclones in the Southern Hemisphere. Our country has had
periods of heavy downpour before and we have been able to stand resilient
against such natural disasters, but this time around, mother nature had a
different story. I would guess that the rains caught us napping, as the trend
had been in some areas and regions. We had houses collapsing, and roads blocked
by an upsurge of water from the overflow of rivers. We had incidences of heavy
flooding immersing houses completely and had a incidence of gushing waters
trailing down a mountain, that cause untold pain and loss in Chimwankhunda. We
have had the highest number of casualties from Natural Disasters after the
1992 Phalombe disaster, with over 176 people reported dead. The loss of
property is incalculable and the impact of the disaster remains vivid weeks
after its occurrence. Many thousand households have been condemned to homelessness
unexpectedly, and it is not an easy ordeal. Some have been hospitalised and
remain in hospital at the time of the publication of this blog. May the Lord
grant us His mercies especially to those sick and in deep loss of property and
loved ones. The social media was for a moment awash with blame game, finger-pointing
politics, finding out how the government has reacted to the situation and
whether the president was committed to his people. I honestly found no reason
why I should reprise my reasoning on the leaders of the day, imagining the
state of the situation in my neighbourhood. I found the politics of blame-game
unrewarding for the situation.
What should strike us all is the
reality that the nature will remain in a state of uncertainty it is. Natural
disasters of this nature have been reported hitting other countries like
Indonesia, (just this very same year), India (last year in December), Pakistan
(2011), United States in the state of New Orleans (Hurricane Katrina) and other countries. What I know is
that such natural disasters have a tendency of catching you unaware and
inflicting a lot of pain on the remnants. The questions that have to prick our
minds are: How prepared are we as a nation for such natural disasters? Do we
have what it takes to create temporary relief to those affected without over-relying
on external humanitarian and relief aid? Are we ready to combat another plague,
be it an outbreak or an earthquake and bar casualties to their minimal levels?
I believe that these questions are very critical to the disaster preparedness
department.
Reviewing these questions, my
answer is that we are not. We do not have temporary measures to offer to those
inflicted by natural disasters. I presume we need to build up our capacities to
the actual levels of resilience. We seem to lack tents, choppers, an alert
system for the meteorological department and adequate funding for the natural
disasters in place. We need to build technical capacity to observe and estimate
the nature of impact and the quantity of relief needed to mitigate the pain of
loss for the victims. In Japan, a country that lies along the ‘ring of fire’ makes
proper precautionary measures against natural disasters such as earthquakes and
tsunamis. They conduct seismological tests regularly to predict likelihoods of
earthquakes and they alert the inhabitants of low laying areas way in advance
when a tsunami of an earthquake is just about to happen. Their building
structures are tried and tested for earthquakes of high magnitudes. This does
not suggest that they have managed to succumb their fear of earthquakes and
natural disasters, nor does it suggest that they stand on top of all kinds of
natural disasters, but rather that they have the technical and resource
capacity to mitigate the pain of loss in the event of any natural disaster. On
the contrary, the country is still on the sickbed in terms of its social
services, such as the electricity and water supply remain erratic as aftermaths
of the Malawi Floods. The debris from the flood had severely damaged the
turbines and almost placed the national economy at a halt. We need to wake up
from this situation in terms of placing in policies that will make the country
more resilient to the natural disasters, such as the floods. We need to talk
more about building capacities and reinforcing our infrastructures to resist
destruction that comes from these disasters. We need a careful introspection as
a country to move ahead, just as we realize that we are 50 years older than
when we began to rule ourselves. VIVA MALAWI! VIVA THE WARM HEART OF AFRICA!
