TOM EATON | To survive climate change, Durban needs a leadership change

The grief in eThekwini is total. The images – of highways turned into rivers, collapsing hillsides dragging homes away with them, mountains of garbage and debris dumped on ruined beaches – are apocalyptic. But they will not be the last.

SA is familiar with catastrophic floods. In two days in 1981 the mountains above Laingsburg in the Karoo received double their annual rainfall and a wall of water and mud came down on the small town. Ninety percent of its homes were destroyed. Seventy-two of the 104 people who died were never found.

These types of disasters are shocking, but we comfort ourselves with the knowledge that they are rare. It takes a freak weather event to cause a disaster like the one in Laingsburg.

The heart-breaking crisis in eThekwini, however, can offer no such consolation.

Climate science is a vast field with many interlinking disciplines, many of which refuse to deal in over-arching, simplified narratives, but I think it’s fair to say the consensus is that, on our current trajectory, extreme weather events will become more frequent and more violent.

Of course, ANC elections are about patronage, not leadership. But what’s the point of building a unsustainable palace on a hill, the way Gumede did, if it’s going to get washed away every two years?

In 2019 some optimists might have hoped the devastating floods in eThekwini that killed more than 70 people and displaced almost 2,000 were an anomaly.

When the Dolphin Coast was hit by flash floods the next year, they might have reminded themselves of the old saying that once is an accident, twice is a coincidence.

But this week’s disaster, which has killed at least 60 people, has provided the grim ending to that saying: three times is a pattern.

This would be a problem for any major city, but the re-election of Zandile Gumede to senior office in eThekwini at the weekend underlines the existential crisis facing the region.

Cities can — and will — adapt to climate change. But they can’t do it if they’re paralysed by corruption and dysfunction, and by re-electing Gumede, with everything that that implies, eThekwini has put an enormous obstacle in its way.

Residents are lashing out, blaming the ANC for failing infrastructure and a lack of disaster planning. I understand their rage. But until the ANC is voted out of power, and can no longer inflict people like Gumede on us, these failures will continue, and, inevitably, turn lethal.

eThekwini can cope with climate change. It might even cope with the ANC, for a time. But it can’t cope with both at the same time. No municipality in South Africa can.