The cold front that hijacked South Africa’s dinner conversations last week is more or less behind us (for now). This is my first winter since returning home from studying abroad. I spent the last two years in Denmark and Germany, thinking their snowy winters would make me a cold expert when I returned to the sunny south. Needless to say, I’ve spent a good sum of money on heaters, electric blankets and tea in these last few weeks. It was also in Denmark that I experienced snow for the first time in December 2022. Around seven months later, so did Joburg residents — “if only I had stuck around a bit longer, I could’ve seen it here for free,” I remember thinking. Well, I got to experience these conditions this last week. And I hated it.
Sure, South Africa gets the occasional extreme cold snap — they say it happens every decade or so. But this last round has recentered the topic in my mind, drawing up questions about the urgency of the broader climate crisis and our government’s poor preparation and response. The weather will only get worse and us more vulnerable.
Is this due to climate change?
We’re all familiar with the term and impact of climate change, or “the climate crisis” as it is increasingly being referred to – extreme and unpredictable weather due to poor environmental practices. South Africa has dealt with a range of climate issues in recent times; remember KZN’s disastrous floods and tornado? The damage was so bad that a National Disaster was declared.
Back in 2023, when snow greeted Joburg, many wondered, “Is this normal?” According to Wayne Venter, meteorologist and forecaster at the South African Weather Service, it is. “This is normal, especially for winter. Most recorded snow events in the past over Gauteng occurred in winter — such as the snow events of July 1963, July 1964, July 1968, September 1981, August 2012 and today (10 July 2023),” said Venter.
But snow in spring of 2024? Definitely an irregularity. And snow of this magnitude and scale? It’s not a comforting sign.
So while snow in certain parts of the country in winter may not be because of climate change per se, weird weather patterns are emerging that are both heavier and harder to anticipate and address.
Climate change or not — people are dying
An article in the South African Journal of Science puts it plainly: “When snowfall does occur over highly populated areas, it causes widespread disruption to infrastructure and even loss of life.”
The damage caused by KZN’s 2022 floods resulted in a death count of nearly 500.
The tornado that struck the province two years later claimed the lives of at least 12 people.
A few months after that, during 2024’s spring snow rarity, two people died from hypothermia when trapped in their car on the N3.
And in this latest cold snap, heavy rain and snow caused flooding that swept away a bus carrying high school students in the Eastern Cape province. At least 7 people have died from this event, with around 57 losing their lives throughout the province.
Not to mention unreported accidents and deaths due to extreme weather, loss of animal life, the stress of it all on those who are homeless, and damage to land and infrastructure. Which leads me to my next point.
We are not built for this
Something that really stood out to me during my winters in Europe was the fact that I only noticed the cold when I left my apartment. Inside, strong infrastructure, insulation and central heating kept me safe. So did their public transport system. Buses and trams stopped operations if the roads were too dangerous, and the underground train system got people where they needed to go. But even then, in a walkable city, grocery stores were a short stroll away, avoiding the need to take the train unless you desperately needed to.
South Africa’s own preparedness for the cold is leagues below. Our homes are more built with the summer months in mind, making many feel colder inside than out come May. Not to mention the fact that extreme weather causes electricity outages (not that we’re unfamiliar with those), with the cold becoming unbearable. This forces us to pull out the gas heaters, an unsafe practice of heating, leading to more cases of carbon monoxide poisoning and house fires. And on the transport side of things, we’re a car-obsessed country. With poor public transport systems in place, there is an ill-founded hope that our pothole-ridden streets will get us to our destinations safely.
And our leaders need to do more
The Presidential Climate Commission commissioned a report last year to inform how we can strengthen our climate change responses. It found that “barriers to progress include incoherent policies, weak governance structures, insufficient finance, and inconsistent actions by the government and other stakeholders.”
Despite this commission being established and chaired by Ramaphosa himself, his government, already tainted with a reputation for corruption and mismanagement, frame these occurrences as a “force of nature” or “natural disasters”. Never mind that KZN flooding is an annual occurrence, snow in Gauteng every decade or so is “normal”, and it getting cold in winter is an incredibly basic expectation. The narrative that it is out of their hands is just another tactic to avoid action and responsibility.
As political analyst Ralph Mathekga puts it in his News24 article, “This is not unfounded cynicism; instead it is a sentiment based on observation of what happens when significant funds are deployed during a crisis”. Think government PPE corruption during the pandemic.
So while we drain our salaries into blankets and electric bills, people lose their houses to tornadoes and children get swept off roads, let’s double down on continuing this conversation and holding our leaders to account.
Kajal holds an MA in Journalism, Media, and Globalisation from the Ludwig Maximillian University of Munich. She has previous experience in African-focused humanitarian media and transnational newsrooms. The enduring power of words in shaping the narrative of tomorrow remains the foundation upon which she builds her career.
COLUMN | SA’s latest cold front is a brutal reminder of our poor climate response
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The cold front that hijacked South Africa’s dinner conversations last week is more or less behind us (for now). This is my first winter since returning home from studying abroad. I spent the last two years in Denmark and Germany, thinking their snowy winters would make me a cold expert when I returned to the sunny south. Needless to say, I’ve spent a good sum of money on heaters, electric blankets and tea in these last few weeks. It was also in Denmark that I experienced snow for the first time in December 2022. Around seven months later, so did Joburg residents — “if only I had stuck around a bit longer, I could’ve seen it here for free,” I remember thinking. Well, I got to experience these conditions this last week. And I hated it.
Sure, South Africa gets the occasional extreme cold snap — they say it happens every decade or so. But this last round has recentered the topic in my mind, drawing up questions about the urgency of the broader climate crisis and our government’s poor preparation and response. The weather will only get worse and us more vulnerable.
Is this due to climate change?
We’re all familiar with the term and impact of climate change, or “the climate crisis” as it is increasingly being referred to – extreme and unpredictable weather due to poor environmental practices. South Africa has dealt with a range of climate issues in recent times; remember KZN’s disastrous floods and tornado? The damage was so bad that a National Disaster was declared.
Back in 2023, when snow greeted Joburg, many wondered, “Is this normal?” According to Wayne Venter, meteorologist and forecaster at the South African Weather Service, it is. “This is normal, especially for winter. Most recorded snow events in the past over Gauteng occurred in winter — such as the snow events of July 1963, July 1964, July 1968, September 1981, August 2012 and today (10 July 2023),” said Venter.
But snow in spring of 2024? Definitely an irregularity. And snow of this magnitude and scale? It’s not a comforting sign.
So while snow in certain parts of the country in winter may not be because of climate change per se, weird weather patterns are emerging that are both heavier and harder to anticipate and address.
Climate change or not — people are dying
An article in the South African Journal of Science puts it plainly: “When snowfall does occur over highly populated areas, it causes widespread disruption to infrastructure and even loss of life.”
The damage caused by KZN’s 2022 floods resulted in a death count of nearly 500.
The tornado that struck the province two years later claimed the lives of at least 12 people.
A few months after that, during 2024’s spring snow rarity, two people died from hypothermia when trapped in their car on the N3.
And in this latest cold snap, heavy rain and snow caused flooding that swept away a bus carrying high school students in the Eastern Cape province. At least 7 people have died from this event, with around 57 losing their lives throughout the province.
Not to mention unreported accidents and deaths due to extreme weather, loss of animal life, the stress of it all on those who are homeless, and damage to land and infrastructure. Which leads me to my next point.
We are not built for this
Something that really stood out to me during my winters in Europe was the fact that I only noticed the cold when I left my apartment. Inside, strong infrastructure, insulation and central heating kept me safe. So did their public transport system. Buses and trams stopped operations if the roads were too dangerous, and the underground train system got people where they needed to go. But even then, in a walkable city, grocery stores were a short stroll away, avoiding the need to take the train unless you desperately needed to.
South Africa’s own preparedness for the cold is leagues below. Our homes are more built with the summer months in mind, making many feel colder inside than out come May. Not to mention the fact that extreme weather causes electricity outages (not that we’re unfamiliar with those), with the cold becoming unbearable. This forces us to pull out the gas heaters, an unsafe practice of heating, leading to more cases of carbon monoxide poisoning and house fires. And on the transport side of things, we’re a car-obsessed country. With poor public transport systems in place, there is an ill-founded hope that our pothole-ridden streets will get us to our destinations safely.
And our leaders need to do more
The Presidential Climate Commission commissioned a report last year to inform how we can strengthen our climate change responses. It found that “barriers to progress include incoherent policies, weak governance structures, insufficient finance, and inconsistent actions by the government and other stakeholders.”
Despite this commission being established and chaired by Ramaphosa himself, his government, already tainted with a reputation for corruption and mismanagement, frame these occurrences as a “force of nature” or “natural disasters”. Never mind that KZN flooding is an annual occurrence, snow in Gauteng every decade or so is “normal”, and it getting cold in winter is an incredibly basic expectation. The narrative that it is out of their hands is just another tactic to avoid action and responsibility.
As political analyst Ralph Mathekga puts it in his News24 article, “This is not unfounded cynicism; instead it is a sentiment based on observation of what happens when significant funds are deployed during a crisis”. Think government PPE corruption during the pandemic.
So while we drain our salaries into blankets and electric bills, people lose their houses to tornadoes and children get swept off roads, let’s double down on continuing this conversation and holding our leaders to account.
Kajal Premnath
Kajal holds an MA in Journalism, Media, and Globalisation from the Ludwig Maximillian University of Munich. She has previous experience in African-focused humanitarian media and transnational newsrooms. The enduring power of words in shaping the narrative of tomorrow remains the foundation upon which she builds her career.
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