HELMOED RÖMER HEITMAN: Underfunded SANDF left on shelf until someone somewhere is in hot water

It may not seem that way, but the SA National Defence Force (SANDF) is always on our government’s mind. The proof is that every time something goes wrong it turns to the military to fix things.          

Border insecure? Police unable to cope with heavily armed gangs? Unrest verging on insurrection? Violent strikes? Floods or bush fires? A pandemic? Instability in the region? Terrorism next door? Piracy in regional waters? Rotor needed for Koeberg? Sabotage at Eskom? Neighbour needing help with election logistics? Who do we call? The military of course!

The rest of the time the SANDF can go play in a corner quietly. After all, who needs it? That disconnect makes the lyrics of the Elvis Presley hit Always on My Mind so apposite: “Maybe I didn’t treat you; Quite as good as I should have. Little things I should have said and done; I just never took the time. You were always on my mind.”

The SANDF is also at the forefront of the government and the National Treasury’s thinking come budget time. Need money for a new Mickey Mouse project or to set up yet another unnecessary ministry? Where will the money come from? Easy, cut the defence budget a bit more. After all, who needs them?

Rudyard Kipling summed it up nicely in Tommy: “It’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ Tommy, go away; It’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ Tommy, fall be’ind. But it’s please to walk in front, sir, when there’s trouble in the wind. It’s saviour of ’is country when the guns begin to shoot.”

This schizophrenic approach has been perfectly clear over the past quarter century. The defence budget has steadily declined in real terms and even in funny money, while the number, variety and scale of tasks the SANDF has been given have steadily escalated.

Initially, the position was that the military should have no internal functions except during truly dire disasters. So the border protection mission and associated budget were moved to the police. When the police failed dismally at the task it was tossed back to the defence force, initially without the relevant budget. And since then army deployments in support of the police have become a matter of routine, with the unrest of 2021 a recent example.

Then came “we will never operate in Africa”, later modified to “at most one battalion for one year” for benign peacekeeping. So we didn’t need all those troop transport vehicles and aircraft, nor a lot of ships in the navy. Then there was the 1998 intervention in Lesotho. Then came AU and UN calls for SA to “do its bit” on the continent, and by the mid-2000s we had three battalions plus other elements deployed outside SA on open-ended, long-term missions — Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Darfur, and briefly a fourth in the Comoros in 2006. The battalion in the DRC is still there, with a reaction force, a mixed helicopter detachment and other elements added. 

In late 2010 we undertook to “protect Southern African Development Community (Sadc) waters against piracy” despite the fleet being too small to take on the task. And, horror of horrors, pirates attacked ships in the Mozambique Channel in early 2011, leading to the navy being tasked with standing patrols in the channel, which it can no longer execute because we have not given the navy the funds to maintain its ships properly.

Quite apart from that it has too few ships to patrol our own exclusive economic zone, or Marion and Prince Edward islands, let alone the Mozambique Channel, and the air force lacks effective maritime surveillance aircraft to support the navy. Not to mention that SA cannot meet its international search and rescue commitments.

In 2013 came the attempt to act as a buffer in the Central African Republic until the Libreville Accord could be fully implemented. Hence the action in Bangui in March 2013 — and the proof that we do, in fact, need real airlift capability and capacity when we had to scramble to charter aircraft to respond to a rapidly deteriorating situation. It was only the outstanding actions of the troops in Bangui that averted disaster.

Come 2022 we finally had to admit that the insurgency in Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado province was a serious problem for Sadc. But oops, where to find the troops to deploy a useful force? Or the airlift to deploy and sustain them? Even more painful, where to find the helicopters to give them air support? At least the navy can conduct a maritime interdiction operation to prevent any supplies reaching the insurgents by sea. Or can it?

The answer to the first has not yet been found, with the army stretched to meet the demand for deployable troops to the border and the DRC and now Mozambique. The answer to the second was to move overland and rely on Angola. The answer to the third is, if we stay with a musical theme, “blowin’ in the wind”.

Stripped of adequate maintenance funding, the air force has only been able to deploy two Oryx transport helicopters, with no Rooivalk to escort them or to cover insertion or extraction or casualty evacuation. And the answer to the fourth is no, the navy cannot; it does not have the operational ships to maintain that standing interdiction patrol.   

Sewerage systems

Other tasks have included evacuating Tanzanian troops from Kamina in the DRC before advancing rebels got there, providing ships to stand by during diplomatic efforts, flying protection teams for presidential visits, assisting other countries after ammunition explosions and sinkings of ferries, and flying rescue teams to Algeria and Iran after earthquakes.

And in the meantime the defence force has had to deploy staff to take over from striking nurses, troops to protect nurses and doctors, troops to support the police in crime suppression operations, technical personnel to repair sewerage systems neglected to the point of disaster, troops to enforce the Covid-19 lockdowns, troops to put down the rioting in 2021, and now troops to protect power stations.

Not to mention flood rescue in Mozambique and elsewhere, bridge repair in Zimbabwe and election support in the DRC, and security for the AU founding session, World Cup 2010 and a host of other missions, some requiring major deployment.

Through all of this the defence force has somehow pulled a rabbit out of its hat each time and done the job, usually well, sometimes astonishingly well. There is nothing wrong with our people, but it is money that makes the machine work. The defence force is not just the guarantor against aggressive adventures, but also something of a jack of all trades, able to help out in myriad ways. But it cannot go on doing so forever on a declining budget, especially with its list of tasks steadily expanding.

Any machine that is overused, overstressed and undermaintained will eventually fail and finally break. So will the SANDF. And then we will blame the soldiers.

• Heitman is an independent security and defence analyst.