Eastern Cape Rural Development MEC, Mlibo Qoboshiyane, will visit Elliotdale on Tuesday to assess the impact of the drought conditions in rural parts of the province.
His spokesperson, Mvusi Sicwetsha, says MEC Qoboshiyane is also expected to present his department's plans to provide drought relief support to farmers and food security programmes in the province.
"We'll have definite answer when we've complete that assessment. The areas that are not affected by drought are the coastal belt areas. In all these other areas we a looking at ways of responding to the problem that will arise from drought," said Sicwetsha.
He also said that Qoboshiyane would begin his visit on Tuesday by presenting a brick-making machine to a Youth Cooperative in Elliotdale.
Sicwetsha said Qoboshiyane would also be visiting maize fields in the area.
"He will go the area where we (the Dept) have invested about R200 000 for fencing. We are bringing infrastructure to make sure that the maize that we plant is protected from other things," he added.
In the Free State the province's disaster management has warned that the province will only have water for the next 24 days.
This is according to the chairperson of the Provincial Joint Operations Centre on the Drught, Buthana Komphela.
He told our sister station OFM that the province was in dire straits.
Komphela said the province has initiated numerous mitigation actions, such as the rehabilitation of boreholes across the province. He says the army has also been called in to assist with water provision in towns where the taps have also started running dry, such as Smithfield.
He said they are ready to start evacuating patients if there is not sufficient water for medical procedures:
"This, is so severe that this ProvJoc is ready to evacute (patients needing) life-threatening operations at all hospitals in the Free State," he said.
Meanwhile, hundreds of people in Limpopo were left homeless after their houses were damaged by a storm that saw the roofs of at least 200 houses blown off.
The storm saw huge, tennis ball sized hailstones shatter roofs and destroy properties.
Cooperative Governance department spokesperson, Motupa Selomo said after the heavy weekend storm had dispersed residents in the hardest-hit areas were still struggling to come to terms with the devastation.
Selomo said the government had deployed disaster management to affected districts to assess the damage. “We can confirm that the province has been hit hard by the disaster on weekend when storm ravaged scattered areas.”
The provincial disaster management centre said homes in part of the Sekhukhune and Mopani districts were the ones hardest hit hard by the storm. Over 110 houses in the Mopani district were left without roofs.
At Apel village, south of Polokwane, at least 34 homes were left without roofs.
Storms also lashed parts of Gauteng on Monday with hail the size of golf balls.
According to one report the roof of the Southgate Mall cave in as a result of the storm.
Many cars were also damaged.
