Only 26,3% of the R138,5 million drought-relief funding that was made available to seven provinces through the National Disaster Management Centre earlier this year, to alleviate the adverse impact of the drought, has been spent.
This was according to a presentation by the Department of Agriculture, Land Reform and Rural Development’s climate change and disaster management director, Dr Ikalafeng Kgakatsi. He updated Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Agriculture, Land Reform and Rural Development on the impact of the drought on the agriculture sector, and the implementation of drought relief in affected provinces.
These provinces included the Eastern Cape, KwaZulu-Natal, Limpopo, North West, the Western Cape, Mpumalanga, and the Northern Cape. So far only about R36,4 million of what had been allocated had been used for the drilling and equipping of boreholes,…