Durban - The pain of death and destruction brought on by the floods in April last year dominated the third leg of the public hearings into the Climate Change Bill held in Durban on Sunday.
Hearings were also held in Pietermaritzburg and Stanger. Residents lined up to tell members of the Portfolio Committee on Forestry, Fisheries and Environment, who visited KwaZulu-Natal to conduct the hearings, of the impact the floods continued to have on their lives.
Others spoke of the extensive damage caused to infrastructure that has yet to be repaired.
Those who spoke on the content of the bill said the government should do more to hold offending companies responsible for pollution.
The bill seeks to ensure the effective management of climate-change impacts and has been in the making for the past few years. The hearing in Durban came on the eve of the first anniversary of the floods that destroyed bridges and roads and service infrastructure (water and electricity and sanitation infrastructure), washed away houses and claimed close to 400 lives.
Durban residents packed the Westville Civic Centre to make their contribution to the bill and to air their grievances. Nhlanhla Thusi spoke of the trauma his family continues to experience almost 11 months after the floods.
“I am here because I am looking for a way forward. I have lost my father, who disappeared in the floods. He was a bus driver. We managed to find and dig up the bus he was driving, but we have not been able to find my father. We have no body, no paper (death certificate), there is nothing that can help us move forward. We have not been able to mourn or perform all the cultural rituals that we are supposed to perform when someone passes away,” he said.
A survivor of the floods, Sibongile Mkhize of uMlazi, spoke of how she was rescued by neighbours. “My neighbours helped me out of the house, and five minutes later my house was gone, there was nothing left of it.”
She added that in 2019 there were floods, and the victims were housed in halls and tents for two years before they were moved to tin houses where they remained. She called on the government to move speedily to re-settle the 2022 floods victims in a proper environment, saying she feared that if they were not provided with proper homes before next year’s election, they might be “forgotten”.
Mkhize highlighted the infrastructure damage, pointing out that the road that connects uMlazi to Lamontville has yet to be fixed. She said this was having a serious impact on primary school pupils who now had to take a long detour to get to their schools.
Another community member, Thandi Madlala, said that in her area of ward 107, which incorporates Ntuzuma and Inanda, they lost a bridge that had not been repaired.
Other residents alleged that there were several big companies in Durban that were “killing” the community living around them through toxic chemicals that were emitted by their operations.
They said there were laws in place to deal with this pollution, but there was a lack of enforcement by the government.
Those who spoke on the content of the bill highlighted its deficiencies, saying that companies that violated anti-pollution laws should be sanctioned. They said the fines should be in the region of around R50 million, otherwise the companies would pay the fine and continue polluting.
They also called for the fines to be used to develop the communities that had been polluted.