Floods don’t always turn into disasters!

I can see you are already shaking your head, weighed by doubt. Is it possible, you ask, to experience floods without disasters?
Do not worry for you are not alone. The bad thing is that some, in your group, are policy makers.
You see, we cannot control the amount of rain we receive—even its intensity over a given period of time. To mean, though we can reduce the swelling of the rivers through containing siltation, we cannot stop rivers from flooding.
However, it is not always that when a river floods, it kills people or destroys properties. Flooding, thus, is only a disaster when, just like we saw in the past week, kills people or destroys property.
That is why it is possible to manage regular flooding rivers from turning into disasters. We can let rivers flood without causing disasters.
But how?
It is that simple: We need, with honesty and frankness, to shift our management attention from disaster response to disaster preparedness.
Perhaps a brief history would help explain what I mean.
Disasters have always been part of Malawi’s history, but the infamous Phalombe floods of 1991 were a breaking point.
In a show of seriousness, government came up with legislations that defined future tone and culture of managing disasters in the country.
Unfortunately, the legislations only emphasised on disaster response.
The defining philosophy, then, was that disasters cannot be prevented as such, the focus should be on responding to them after they strike by, among others, providing relief items to victims.
However, over the years, researchers have been steadfast in examining ways on how disasters can be contained. Their findings were quite moving and in 2005, various nations met in Japan and agreed to shift from response to preparedness when managing disasters. The agreement is what is known as the Hyogo Framework of Action (HFA) and Malawi is a signatory.
At the heart of it is what is known as Disaster Risk Management (DRM). Basically, DRM entails the need for people to look critically at risk factors that have potential to cause disasters. For instance, Shire River is a risk because when it swells into floods, it has the potential to cause disasters. What is it that we should do to Shire River or any other river, to reduce its risk of causing disasters? Some proposed re-locating those living adjacent to it or enlightening those living adjacent to rivers so when they misbehave, they (people) should move upland. Others, yet, advanced the need for proper construction of houses.
Interestingly, since the Hyogo Framework of 2005, we have seen government ‘talking’ a lot about the need for Malawians, too, to understand the important of DRM. In these years, again, we have also seen many non-governmental organisations (NGOs) implementing DRM-driven projects in some disaster prone districts.
One of such districts is Chikwawa. Interestingly, I was in the district from Monday to Wednesday last week covering the flooding which engulfed the country. Luckily, I visited a couple of villages which I knew were beneficiaries of DRM projects by NGOs. Yes, I witnessed the horror of falling houses, washed away crops and devastated properties. But I was impressed at how the locals, even before government officials turned up, managed to mobilise themselves to safety after their rain gauges and the levers they had put in their rivers started to misbehave. I can testify here that most of these villages have not recorded human deaths.
If, I asked myself, such small initiatives could help, at least, to reduce the effects on flooding on human life, what if DRM initiatives were taken full throttle to the disaster prone districts?
Paradoxically, most of these NGO’s DRM initiatives are not coordinated. For close to six years now, the DRM policy, the document which is supposed to guide DRM issues in Malawi, is still in draft form. For two years now, it is stuck at the Cabinet level. Are we serious?
I am sure, even if we cannot control flooding, we can, at least, contain them from turning into disasters. But the first thing, Mr President, let’s have the policy.