It costs money to keep SA safe
There’s a fundamental mismatch between the funds SANDF gets and the expectations heaped upon it
THERE are huge expectations placed on our national defence force. Our soldiers must protect our land borders, our sailors must watch over our waters and our air force must guard our skies. These are the same expectation of any defence force the world over.
It is our primary mandate, our constitutional one, in fact, but here in South Africa, there are added challenges.
We are supposed to take the lead in Africa, one of the tinderboxes of the world, making our contribution to standing UN peacekeeping missions and have our troops on stand-by to intervene wherever there is a flashpoint. But we also intervene here, at home.
We use our engineers to build bridges when roads are washed away, we go into disaster areas to rescue stranded people, we purify water so that those in distress won’t die of thirst or disease.
Together we fight fires which flare up at any given time anywhere in the country, as witnessed in recent times, in particular in the Western Cape.
When there is unrest, we deploy to help the police keep and maintain order.
When civilian services collapse, like the health service in North West, we send out specialists to serve the people, who otherwise would have no access to the services their constitution guarantees them.
This all happens as part of the defence force collateral in times of peace.
But that’s not all; we train young South Africans, giving them not just basic military skills, but others that are incredibly useful when they return to civilian life – from being able to drive to being valuable members of society who are disciplined and can follow instructions, as well as lead when called upon to do so.
In many ways, the SANDF has successfully carried out its duties.
Getting soldiers and sailors to a level where they can function in their basic musterings takes time, expertise and, most of all, money.
It takes money to buy the equipment they need to use to train. It takes money to train them on the use of that very equipment.
When you start training soldiers to conduct large-scale operations, it takes a lot of resources and effort, because if you don’t prepare them for the emergencies when you can, it will be too late when you do deploy them.
The brutal truth is that if we are not well trained we cannot serve in a professional way, but perhaps even more importantly, soldiers that are not properly trained result in casualties. The military does not have any margin of error, which is why we train so hard to ensure that we only ever have to deploy as a last resort.
It is expensive to keep this country safe, but nobody seems to understand that.
Defence, once again, is the poor relation in government.
There is a perception in some quarters that the SANDF is run by generals who just want to build bigger empires for themselves and have the same expensive toys that go bang that other generals in other armies have. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The SANDF has launched and continues to run Operation Broekskeur, a delightful Afrikaans phrase that means operating by the skin of our teeth, our generals and our admirals have to work with what they have.
Even then, we still need money to fix the barracks that we expect our soldiers to live in when they are not in the field. We need to maintain our barracks at all times to ensure that our troops are cared for at all times.
We are doing the best we can with that which we have. Our record speaks for itself, where our troops have been deployed, where they operate.
We have had disciplinary incidents, but given the size of the force we operate, these are an infinitesimal fraction of the whole being dealt with at unit level, ruthlessly.
There is a fundamental mismatch between the funds we get and the expectations our country’s leaders and those of the continent have of us, but the elastic band can only be stretched so far until, one day, it snaps.
I sincerely hope we never get to that point, but we are sailing very close to the edge – so close that our fellow South Africans should be both proud of our resource management, yet terrified of the very real risk this country is blindly running. z Siphiwe Dlamini is head of communications at the Department of Defence