The KwaZulu-Natal government has told victims of the latest floods that it is too broke to help them rebuild their lives.

At least six people lost their lives when a storm wreaked havoc in the early hours of Sunday and left a trail of destruction in different parts of the province.

People had high hopes when Premier Nomsa MaDube-Ncube's government announced it would visit the affected communities and assess the damage.

But the government told families in Mkhanyakude that it wants to accelerate the urgent repair of critical infrastructure like homes, schools and roads but there are not enough funds to fast-track the work.

"As a province, our budget alone will not suffice to cover the cost of this devastation," said MaDube-Ncube.

She said that the South African Defence Force has intervened in some areas along with the South African Red Cross.

She promised however that mobile classrooms would be provided to the damaged schools.

KZN is already under investigation by the public protector over its failure to spend the R5 billion that was made available for victims of the April 2022 flood.

Auditor General Tsakani Maluleka told Parliament last month that KZN spent only R251 million out of R5 billion to assist flood victims, including the repair of the infrastructure.

"In KZN, when we reflected on the spending of the province, we looked at the funds that were made available and saw that there was slow response, lack of disaster readiness, quality of work not monitored and lack of effective oversight," said Maluleka.

About 600 households were devastated in this past weekend's storms.

In Ladysmith, the water purification plant was destroyed. Communities were informed that the lightning that occurred on Saturday night during the storm caused serious damage to the purification plant and transformers.

The damage caused an electrical failure to the Klipriver raw water pump station which led to the purification of water at 60% of daily production.