The Eastern Cape Co-operative Governance department says it’s working with relevant stakeholders in making the necessary plans to deal with the drought.
This after the drought ravaging the province and two other provinces was re-classified from provincial to be declared a national disaster.
Cogta MEC, Fikile Xasa says the province calculated more than R7 billion costs to tackle the crisis.
“We have calculated what will this could come to, for Sarah Baartmaan, Nelson Mandela Bay and Amathole approximately this could cost us about R7 billion as the province. But of course because this is matter for the whole country, we hope resources will be mobilised across the country, across the departments and the private sectors to make sure that we are able to respond to the challenge.”
Xasa has urged citizens to use water sparingly.
“Our response as the country, a ministerial task team was established which is composed by different ministerial delegates from affected provinces, we have looked at the situation and we agreed that what we need to do is to make critical stakeholders aware of the effect of drought equally the private sectors and the community and find measures of how best we can deal with the impact of drought.”
