Budget cuts ‘a threat to defence mandate’
The South African National Defence Force is battling to cope with bruising budget cuts and a rising wage bill, which threaten its ability to carry out its mandate.
The South African National Defence Force (SANDF) is battling to cope with bruising budget cuts and a rising wage bill, which threaten its ability to protect SA’s borders.
The Department of Defence has been among the departments hit hardest by the government’s belt-tightening and is projected to have its annual funding slashed by R5bn in the next five years.
The SANDF has resolved to do its maintenance in-house in order to stay afloat.
The SANDF’s budget allocations from the Treasury have been declining in real terms and this is not helped by the rise in the military’s personnel costs.
An unintended consequence was that the SANDF was strugthat gling to fulfil its mandate as the guardian of SA’s borders, defence secretary Makhudu Gulube conceded in an interview with Business Day.
Gulube, however, defended the SANDF’s growing salary bill, its biggest expenditure item, saying the defence force could not function without its people.
Estimates show the SANDF spends more than 40% of its budget on personnel, whereas the globally accepted standard for defence force expenditure on personnel is 38%.
“It is true that, when viewed in totality, the defence budget has decreased over the medium-term budget policy framework. This decrease affected us … severely over the past five years,” Gulube said.
A decade ago, when SA’s economy was growing, the Department of Defence’s budget was more than 2% of GDP, but it now stands at less than 0.8% of GDP with further cuts pencilled in for the next financial year.
“In the next five years we see an effective reduction of R5bn” in real terms, Gulube said.
The SANDF would have to rely increasingly on its own personnel to perform tasks were procured externally.
“The defence force capabilities are now on a decline, [which] we are doing our best to arrest. In terms of our assessment, we need 22 companies to safeguard our borders effectively, but because of our reductions we can only deploy 15.”
The SANDF was exploring a plan to repair its vehicles internally. Its officials were communicating with the Cuban armed forces about a similar initiative that had been successful there.
The government had established a Department of Defence and Treasury budget task team to ensure that the budget allocation did not totally degrade the credibility and functionality of the SANDF.
The Treasury said the defence budget allocation over the 2017 medium-term expenditure framework would stand at R48.6bn for 2017-18, R50.6bn for 2018-19 and R53.9bn for 2019-20.
“The Department of Defence has budgeted R3bn over the 2017 medium-term expenditure framework for border safeguarding, if one refers to its estimates of national expenditure for details around border safeguarding,” said the Treasury.
The Treasury would not share with the media the latest developments in its engagements with departments.