CHRIS ROPER: Newsfluencers are all well and good, but facts remain sacred
Why are South African soldiers footing their own bills for flights home and receiving so little for serving in dangerous conflict zones?
Those of us who peruse the popular press learnt a few things about our world last week. Well, I say popular press, but it would perhaps be more appropriate to say the increasingly unpopular press. More on that later.
We learnt that South African soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) are laying their lives on the line for a pittance, while their office-bound superiors are raking in a lot more money. Journalist Erika Gibson from City Press investigated and discovered that infantry soldiers, the ones who are actually on the frontline risking their lives, earned only a third of the special allowance allocated by the Southern African Development Community (SADC). The special allowance is about R108,000 per soldier per month, and the countries that receive this allocation each decide for themselves how much of the allowance is paid to the soldiers...
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