STRAIGHT TALK
21 April 2022
The country is currently facing several interlinked crises, the most urgent being Eskom’s move to level 4 rolling blackouts, and the devastating floods in KwaZulu-Natal which have led to the re-imposition of the National State of Disaster. The Democratic Alliance is taking important action steps to ensure that these issues are managed in a way that benefits South Africans across the board.
KZN floods and National State of Disaster
The Disaster Management Act allows cabinet to bypass Parliament’s constitutionally mandated role of exercising oversight over the executive, and instead govern by issuing regulations that have not been subjected to parliamentary scrutiny. Cabinet abused this Act during the pandemic, to detrimental effect.
The DA has requested and been granted an ad hoc parliamentary committee to oversee all aspects of the National State of Disaster to respond to floods in KZN and the Eastern Cape. This will help to ensure that this time, public money benefits citizens rather than cadres. (Meantime, our legal challenge of the Disaster Management Act, to try to correct this flaw in the legislation, is making its way through the court system.)