Disaster risk management: Taking a leaf from the priestly legacy and the African worldview.

Abstract

Each moment a devastating disaster strikes, the age-old problem of evil inevitably comes to mind. God’s omnipotence and omniscience are once again called into question. The devastating 2019 Cyclone Idai, Covid-19, and Cyclone Freddy, temperatures hitting unprecedented record highs across the world in 2023 for example, remain mind-boggling disasters that call for explanation and by default efforts to avoid or minimise the repeat of such disasters. Faced with the remarkable, unprecedented, and terrifying reality of climate change, repeated warnings of global boiling have been issued and calls to adopt United Nations SMART-based plans of action are becoming louder as well. As the world pins its hopes on SMART action plans to unplug the tragic consequences of climate change, the paper bemoans what one views as a deliberate sidelining of religion in all these efforts. Through a comparative analysis, the paper interrogates the Priestly legacy and the African worldview in an attempt to salvage lessons from them on how ancients were tackling disaster risk reduction. Both emphasize a vital starting point to disaster reduction, namely: the concept of collective responsibility. Humans, according to Priestly teachings, are in control of their destiny and every act of social exploitation, and moral corruption, pollutes the sanctuary until such time God is driven out entirely and human society is devoured by its own viciousness and death-dealing. Similarly, from an African worldview, man is created as a moral agent in relation to God his Creator, and fellow men. The underlying argument thus in this paper is that not belittling the advances that have so far been made in the sciences to avert disasters, to offer a comprehensive response to disaster risks, there is a need to tap lessons from the religious traditions of the ancients.