You Cannot Plan for a Disaster You Have Not Measured

But a plan is not a capability. It is the output of one and where that capability is thin, the plan becomes an artefact of compliance: drafted, adopted, filed, and of little use on the day a disaster occurs.

That premise shapes the Disaster Risk Management (DRM) support DMS NPC is delivering with the CSIR under the MCPP, a collaboration between Anglo American, DeBeers (Venetia Mmine) and the Department of Cooperative Governance. Working with Musina and Blouberg Local Municipalities in Limpopo, the objective in each case is a Level 1 DMP. The first step was not drafting, but measurement.

The Current Reality Assessment (CRA) answers that question. Using the National Disaster Management Centre's (NDMC) Municipal DRM Gap Analysis Tool, adapted for local municipalities, municipal teams score themselves against the key performance indicators of the NDMF on a three-point scale: not in place, in progress, or fully in place.

It is done line by line, with the people who hold the function. Musina participated in the CRA in May 2026, drawing in SALGA Limpopo and the Limpopo Provincial Disaster Management Centre (DMC) alongside the municipal team. Blouberg participated in the CRA during June and July, with Capricorn District Municipality participating.

Two design choices shaped the exercise. First, we added an evidence column, requiring every score to point to a document, a council resolution, a register or a set of minutes. A score without evidence is an opinion. Second, only the indicators required for a Level 1 plan were binding. Level 2 and Level 3 requirements were recorded but set aside, so the assessment measured the distance to the next achievable step rather than to a distant ideal.

The shape of that result matters more than the final score. Institutional capacity, Key Performance Area (KPA) 1, scored as the strongest area. The Disaster Management Advisory Forum is established and meets quarterly. A DRM unit exists, with a recognised mandate and provision in the budget vote. The institutional scaffolding is standing.

Beneath it, the three Enablers, namely information and communication, education and training, and funding, scored very low. These are the foundations on which every performance area above them rests. A municipality cannot assess risk without data custodians and somewhere to hold the data. It cannot reduce risk without costed projects in a budget, and it cannot respond without trained people.

Blouberg's assessment tells a similar story. All four KPAs have been scored, with institutional capacity again the strongest. Council has approved a dedicated DRM unit, which is significant because until then the function sat distributed across roads and stormwater, housing and community services, with no single point of coordination when an event occurred.

The first came from a Musina participant who, having been advised to score generously, argued for the opposite. It is better to under-score than to overstate, she noted, because an inflated score removes the very rationale for the support. That instinct, that the assessment is a diagnostic instrument, not a report card, is the most useful thing a municipality can bring to it.

The second is structural. In smaller municipalities the DRM function is rarely anyone's whole job. It is carried part-time by officials who already run technical or community services, and much of the documentation describing local risk sits at district rather than local level. This is not a failure of commitment. It is the operating condition of local government, and a support programme that does not design around it will simply generate a backlog of unanswered requests.

On current evidence, Level 1 is achievable within twelve to eighteen months, not because a document will have been produced, which is the easy part, but because the municipality will by then be able to sustain what that document describes.

The findings remain preliminary, pending verification by district and provincial colleagues and the completion of the document study. That, too, is deliberate. An assessment a municipality has not validated is an assessment it does not own, and a plan built on an unowned assessment is exactly the artefact this work exists to avoid.