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Melissa Harris-Perry: Thanks for starting your week with us on The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry and we begin today in South Africa.

President Cyril Ramaphosa: Communities along parts of our Eastern Coast have been devastated by catastrophic flooding.

Melissa Harris-Perry: You're listening there to South Africa's President Cyril Ramaphosa speaking earlier this month as he describes the recent disaster affecting communities near the port city of Durban.

President Cyril Ramaphosa: On the 11th and 12th of April, parts of KwaZulu-Natal received between 200 and 400 millimeters of rain in a 24-hour period. All parts of the province were affected by the rainfall with the entire eThekwini Metro and districts of iLembe, Ugu, King Cetshwayo, and uMgungundlovu being most affected. Roads, bridges, and houses have been extensively damaged.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Now, these unrelenting heavy rains triggered flooding and mudslides, and according to government officials, more than 400 people have died as a result. Tens of thousands are now displaced from their homes. The devastation led the president to declare a national state of disaster.

President Cyril Ramaphosa: Tonight we are a nation that is united in our grief and pain. We are, however, a nation united in our determination to assist those who have lost their homes and possessions and who are in desperate need of food, water, and shelter. It is estimated that more than 40,000 people have been displaced by these floods. This is a humanitarian disaster that calls for a massive and urgent relief effort.

Melissa Harris-Perry: With nearly 4 million residents, Durban in South Africa's the third-largest city and the largest port in Sub-Saharan Africa. Rested on the warm waters of the Indian ocean for decades, Durban's apartheid beaches barred Black South Africans from even setting foot on vast stretches of the sand, and a quarter-century after the fall of apartheid, the racialized economic segregation of Durban remains visible.

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South Africa continues to struggle with the highest unemployment rate in the world. Almost 35% of the country is unemployed and housing conditions for the poor remain among the most desperate with many communities lacking municipal sanitation or basic infrastructure. It's those living with housing poverty who experienced the brunt of devastation and death during these recent floods.

This isn't the first time. In 2019, floods and landslides killed more than 70 people in the area. John Eligon is Johannesburg bureau chief at the New York Times and he recently reported on how years of government neglect left many poor south Africans and unsafe housing conditions susceptible to climate change. John, welcome to The Takeaway.

John Eligon: Hi, thanks for having me.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Now, you were on the ground after the flooding and devastation. What did you see and experience?

John Eligon: You go through some of these communities and you basically see where small homes once stood, it was all buried in mud. I remember in one township called Inanda which is North of Durban. You're going on this stretch of road that winds through the valleys and you get to a point and all of a sudden it just stops because there's a huge gap that's about the length of a football field where a bridge has collapsed.

At the bottom there, you have communities that have been just completely swept away with mud. You look at the rooftops, you see just a bunch of plastic bottles and wood showing how high the water actually came. It's just complete and utter devastation and a human tragedy of a scale that I've rarely seen.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Tragedy always brings to mind the sense that it was unstoppable, that it was unforeseeable, that it was something that almost randomly happened. On the one hand, I hear you on tragic, but I also wonder about the ways given what we've seen in fairly recent years in this area, if it is exclusively tragic or if it is both tragic and indicative of some set of decision-making failures.

John Eligon: This is in many ways a man-made tragedy, I would say. Our scientists have been ringing the alarm bells about rising temperatures and climate change and what that's done to extreme weather for many years across the globe and in South Africa, it's been no exception. It's not necessarily uncommon to have rain in April in Durban, but what we've seen over the past couple of years is those storms have intensified and with that, they've brought flooding each and every year. In 2017, there were heavy floods. In 2019, there were heavy floods, and now again, in 2022, there are the heaviest floods that people here have seen in recent memory.

Then the second aspect of it is what has the government and policymakers been doing, what have they been doing in order to respond to this increasingly severe weather? That's where we'd have to say that the government may have fallen short. Particularly hardest hit were the poor and were the most vulnerable in this region. In South Africa, for years, they have had a housing crisis where there's a lot of people who just simply cannot afford housing, more than 35% of the country is without jobs.

What you have is oftentimes people who do not have jobs, who do not have money to afford stable housing, they will set up these, what are called informal settlements, which means they basically just find any land they can and they go and they build mostly shack homes or homes build-out of tin or wood and things like that. In this area in Durban which is very hilly, a lot of valleys, a lot of streams and rivers, these tend to be the most dangerous places they set up. They will either set up on a riverbed or they'll set up on a hillside and these are the places where when there's severe rain either the river banks overflow or the hillsides get washed away and that's how you have this devastation.

Most of the devastation and death that we saw here were people in these communities that were poor communities. We can't just look at people who set up in these informal communities. We also have to look at people who were set up in informal communities for that matter, but who are still living in poverty. They're still living in poverty, but they are in communities where the government has set them. We can see that the government is still setting communities up near river banks, on hillsides, in places that are very dangerous and vulnerable to this extreme weather that's caused by the rising global temperatures.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I want you to say a bit more about that because obviously, we started this discussion here hearing from the president, and back in 2019 after a similar although smaller-scale disaster, Durban did announce this climate action plan to address exactly the kinds of issues that you're discussing. How much of this can be laid at the feet either of the national government and of this President in particular, and how much of it is about more regional or local choices?

John Eligon: Well, it's a little bit of both. It goes hand in hand. What this President Ramaphosa-- he has been very aggressive in terms of saying, "Hey, we need to take steps to mitigate climate change or the impacts of climate change here in South Africa." South Africa last year at the cop conference, they did make a deal with wealthy nations in which they were going to receive $8.5 billion in exchange for reducing the country's reliance on coal. Coal is the main driver of energy here, which makes South Africa one of the largest polluters in the world.

There are those mitigation measures, even in Durban as you said, on the local level, they do have a climate resilience strategy, they do have a flooding strategy, and they do have those things, but when I talk to experts who study these things, they say that the issue is when we think about protecting people from the harms of climate change, we often think about these climate mitigation measures. Not putting people in flood plains and then doing different environmental things, but what we don't think about as much is the social ways that we need to address the impact of climate change.

That means taking a holistic approach, looking at what can we do to help the poorest of us. What can we do in terms of creating jobs, creating opportunities for people so that they do not end up in these situations where they have to live in these informal settlements that are in these dangerous areas? It's about addressing not just the environmental situation, but addressing the social problems and the social issues that that's what really leads to creating this larger protection against climate change. That is where many people believe that the government has fallen short in addressing that part of it.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Not just fallen short of addressing it, but just over a decade ago when Durban hosted the World Cup in 2010, there was actual displacement of some of these most vulnerable communities. Can you say a bit more about that?

John Eligon: Yes, exactly. 2009, the year before the World Cup was hosted in South Africa, what we saw in Durban was that they wanted to remove some of these informal settlements from areas where they might be visible to visitors and tourists who were coming in from the World Cup. A lot of these settlements were in areas near the center city where visitors can see them if they're driving down the street or walking or whatnot. What they told some of these folks, and I met a man named Themba Lushaba. With him specifically, he was in a shack settlement with his mother close to the center city.

They said, "Hey, we're moving you out to this field that is South of Durban," and this field just so happens to be right next to a river, it was a former wetland area that was a buffer for that river, but they filled it in and they put what they call transit camps there. They create these prefabricated homes that are made of drywall essentially, just little like box-like structures, they're one-room homes, and they put several hundred people in this camp, in this transit camp.

He was one of the people that went there, and he said, at the time, what they told them was like, "Hey, you'll be here for about three months, even though this is an area that's prone to flooding, it's only been about three months and then we're going to give you all government homes," which here they call them RVP homes. This was in 2009. Now we're looking 13 years and four floods later, Themba is still living there and still waiting for that government home that has never come. [chuckles] He's experienced flooding in 2011, 2017, 2019, and now in 2022.

He said, "This year was definitely the worst by far, even though all of them is the same thing happens, that their homes that they're living in there, they get flooded out, they have to go in there, rake out all the mud, save what things they can and then throw away the things that they can't save, and then just hope that this doesn't happen again.'' When I say the government, in some ways, government planning has led to this, this is what I mean, too. The government's very intention of putting people there saying, "We're going to get you all into stable homes." It's just not happening. That is the result of what we're seeing in many of these communities getting destroyed.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I want to be sure that we don't talk about this just as a matter of policy, or of global climate change, or these big forces, I want to be sure that that we keep this human and on the ground. I understand that you were present when rescuers found the body of a little girl. Can you tell us about what happened there?

John Eligon: Yes. These are the parts of the job, as you might know, Melissa, that we don't necessarily enjoy. We went out with the rescue crew just to see, I guess, I should say, recovery crew at this point because, unfortunately, at this point, the chances of rescuing anyone is zero. We went out with the recovery crew, and they were searching an area. It was down in the valley along a river bed. They were basically searching, there was a family of 10 that were swept away.

Then they were actually swept away at a point that was about four miles up from where they were searching the river, they had been gradually going down the river searching trying to find the family members. As we were there, we were there for by an hour or two, and then at kind of the landing area, they said, "Hey, we found someone." We were waiting there for them to bring the body up. They got a helicopter down there, they recovered the body, put her in a body bag, and then brought her and just dropped her off into the open area.

Then the recovery workers, as well as the police, then opened the body bag to identify her. It was a little girl. The smell was obviously awful, filling the air, there were community members standing around. There was one elderly man who went up there because he was looking for a 20-year-old woman who was missing who was part of his family. Then there was another young man there who was representing this family of 10 that had perished, that had been swept away, and he was looking for her.

You just had this whole community gathering there, and it was just this tense solemn atmosphere where on the one hand, people want to recover their loved ones, on the other hand, if that is your loved one there, it's a shocking thing and then obviously a difficult thing. It really drove home for these communities just the human toll here and just how these are the types of tragedies that really beg for answers and beg for more definitive assertive solutions because these are the types of things that with the proper planning and with the proper action can hopefully be avoided.

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John Eligon: John Eligon, you're right. These are the parts of the job that are tough but I so appreciate you bringing these stories to us. John Eligon is Johannesburg Bureau Chief, The New York Times. Thanks for being with us today.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Thank you for having me.

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