The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) has been challenged to assist developing countries in preparing for potential disasters rather than wait for tragedies to strike and react when lives have already been lost.
BY John Nyashanu,Kuwait City, Kuwait
The call was made by ICT, Postal and Courier Services deputy minister Win Mlambo at the Second Global Forum on Emergency Telecommunications running under the theme Saving Lives in Kuwait City, Kuwait, yesterday.
More than 700 delegates from nearly 100 countries are attending the Forum which was organised by the UN agency with a membership of 193 countries.
“There is need for the ITU Telecommunications Development Bureau (ITU-D) to guide countries in the development of Emergency Telecommunications Plans as part of the countries’ preparedness which would incorporate network resilience and redundancy,” Mlambo said.
“The plan would provide for periodic exercises/drills and simulations to test both system and people readiness. In the case of Zimbabwe, we know precisely that in 12 months, there will be veld fires. But come the time for the fires, people still die due to these inadequacies which centre on human attitudes and lacklustre approach to work.”
Member states of the ITU also came under attack from Tuvalu, a small island in south western Pacific Ocean, accusing them of not taking treaties on disaster management seriously.
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“Over the years, we have been signatories to numerous treaties. We have used countless vocabularies year after year — Risk, Preparedness, Regulatory Frameworks, Saving Lives (etc). But what’s stopping us from cooking the right soup? We need strong political will to achieve this goal,” Monise Laafai, the country’s Minister of Communications and Transport, said.
