By Amy Musgrave
South Africa cannot produce a complete picture of how prepared its municipalities are for disasters, with only five of the country’s nine provinces providing substantive disaster management reporting for 2024/25.
In fact, there has been a decline in reporting, with the Department of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs warning that it is unable to compile a complete national picture for the reporting cycle.
“Reporting on disaster management was markedly uneven and less complete than in the 2023/23 reporting cycle,” reads the Consolidated Annual Local Government Performance Report 2024/25, which was gazetted on Tuesday.
The five provinces that reported substantively are the Free State, Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal, Mpumalanga and the North West.
According to the document, the remaining four provided little or no dedicated disaster management status.
The Eastern Cape referred to disaster management only through disaster recovery grant support for its two metropolitan municipalities – Buffalo City and Nelson Mandela Bay – Limpopo and the Northern Cape referenced only their provincial disaster management centres, and the Western Cape addressed the function only through fire and emergency services training capacity.
“This represents a reduction in coverage relative to 2023/24, when all nine provinces reported on disaster management, including Limpopo, the Northern Cape and the Western Cape, which had then recorded adopted plans and functional structures,” the report reads.
Disaster management readiness is crucial in South Africa because municipalities are on the frontline of floods, fires, storms, droughts and other events that place immense pressure on essential services and infrastructure. And over the years, climate-related risks have increased pressure on already constrained municipalities.
According to a National Treasury/World Bank assessment last year, the country faces average annual disaster relief costs of about R3.7 billion, with 86% of those losses uninsured. Last year alone, floods in the Eastern Cape’s OR Tambo and Amathole districts caused an estimated R5.04 billion in damage to infrastructure, according to the government.
Municipal disaster readiness continues to fail despite various legal requirements.
According to the document, the provinces that did report identified familiar weaknesses. While municipalities may have disaster plans and statutory structures on paper, they often lack funding, staff, infrastructure and operational capacity to respond when a disaster strikes.
Provincial breakdown
The North West reported that several local municipalities lacked appointed disaster management coordinators or adequate personnel, which it described as a major risk to local readiness.
The Free State said that its disaster management centres functioned as administrative units rather than fully developed operational centres, and that only Mangaung met the minimum infrastructure requirements. The majority of its municipalities lacked comprehensive plans and did not address localised vulnerabilities.
Mpumalanga reported inadequate human resources to implement disaster management initiatives. And while all municipalities submitted plans, the provincial disaster management centre advised all of them to review their plans so that aligned with national guidelines.
The report said KwaZulu-Natal’s centre capacity was characterised as uneven across the province. And in parts, there has been a decline, most notably in uMgungundlovu from 68% to 55%.
It said that although Gauteng had a full plan approval, three municipalities only had foundational level 1 plans.
Other issues raised were that coordination between government structures and the integration of disaster management into municipal planning were found to be weak. In the Free State, statutory coordination structures were often dormant or not convened, while Mpumalanga said disaster risk reduction was not adequately combined into integrated development plans or the District Development Model One Plan.
Mpumalanga’s incompatibility with the National Disaster Management Centre and the North West’s weak coordination and poor reporting systems hindered the flow of information between government spheres. This weakened the integration of disaster management into municipal development planning, the report said.
Fire services were another concern, with North West reporting that municipalities were not complying with prescribed readiness standards.
Gauteng was among the few provinces to report a proactive funding response. It established a Disaster Management and Fire Services Support Grant for firefighting infrastructure, together with a humanitarian relief contract.
Climate change
Another concern raised in the report is that climate change has not been mainstreamed across municipal planning and performance reporting. Where ii does feature, it is often treated as part of disaster management rather than as a distinct priority.
It warns that with the arrival of the Climate Change Act, which places assessment and planning duties on municipalities, there is likely to be a demand for more structured reporting on climate resilience in future cycles.
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