Golden Ng’andwe¹, Francis Simui^1,, Gistered Muleya¹

The purpose of this study was to explore the bottlenecks encountered by the military when responding to disasters in Zambia. The institution tasked with responding to disasters in the country is the Disaster Management and Mitigation Unit as mandated by the National Disaster Management Policy of 2015. The military in Zambia are tasked with preserving and defending the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the state against internal and external aggression. However, as part of their secondary role, they respond to disasters when called upon. The study adopted a nominalist ontology, interpretivist epistemology, value laden axiology using qualitative methodology. By so doing it followed a growing number of researchers arguing against positivism, pointing out that social science deals with action and behaviour which are generated from within the human mind and so cannot be studied externally by the researchers and the researched. The study is informed by hermeneutic phenomenology design meant to deduce individual experiences through description of the essences. Participants were drawn from the Zambia Army and officials from the DMMU using homogeneous purposive sampling method. The findings established that the main challenges encountered by the military when responding to disasters in the country are; delays in paying allowances, absence of military personnel at DMMU Headquarters, military response with inappropriate tools, incompatible equipment, inadequate resources, poor reaction time, bureaucracy and procurement of wrong materials. Thus, it is recommended among others that, the entire national disasters management structure in the country should be restructured. This should be replaced with the Disaster Response Team (DRT) to take over from the current Disaster Management Unit. The DRT should continue falling under the office of the Republican Vice President but headed by Director General (preferably a Major General) seconded from the serving or retired members of Defense Force.

defense force, military, disaster, management, mitigation Zambia