SANDF’s response highlights wider issue

On Sunday March 15 2020, President Cyril Ramaphosa announced a state of disaster to help the government address the coronavirus outbreak, which had been declared a global pandemic by the World Health Organisation.

A week later he signed a directive for the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) to deploy across the country in support of the police and the government as they enforced measures to limit the spread of the virus.

The SANDF’s Military Command Council (MCC) met, and this is where things began to go wrong.

The meeting began a chain of events that brought the defence force before parliament this week to explain how it spent more than R200m unlawfully procuring more than 900,000 vials of a Covid-19 drug from Cuba and illegally smuggling them into SA. It even altered documentation to import the drug, the auditor-general (AG) found.

Maj-Gen Mzikayise Tyhalisi, the contracts manager for two other defence force contracts with the Cuban defence force, detailed how, instead of sticking to its Covid mission, the MCC decided it had been deployed in what amounted to “biological warfare”.

Tyhalisi — a two-star general since June — said that after Ramaphosa’s call to the defence force to help, the “military council took a decision to say this seems to be a biological warfare problem, and SAMHS [the South African Military Health Service] was tasked to look for a solution to make sure our soldiers on the ground are actually protected”.

“So they found interferon, which they regarded not as a treatment, but a prophylactic biological product to deal with a biological threat to address a military problem which we are facing at any time,” he said.

Tyhalisi said the defence force used two contracts — one of which was flagged by the AG in 2019 after its costs inexplicably increased from R35m a year for five years to R900m by the fifth year — to procure the drugs.

“We never viewed it as a line item, because if it was a line item we would have gone through the procurement process. We viewed it as a support to a fight against a perceived military and biological threat.”

As could have been anticipated, this did not fly with committee members.

Committee chair Cyril Xaba was quick to dismiss Tyhalisi’s explanation, saying: “We are aware that there is that conspiracy theory and I thought that it had been ruled out.”

The SANDF’s appalling response when called to account is indicative of an attitude of being unaccountable to civilian oversight.

This is the same defence force that was involved in the death of a civilian, Collins Khoza, on South African soil in Alexandra township, Johannesburg, during lockdown last April.

Until Wednesday’s meeting the defence force had not provided any supporting documents for the Cuban procurement to the AG or the South African Health Products Regulatory Agency, two institutions that have been looking into the mess. And there is still the matter of last month’s standoff with Sahpra and the Hawks at the medical base depot where the drugs are stored.

This is exacerbated by the fact that defence minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula — herself a regular delinquent who was recently censured by Ramaphosa for illegally ferrying ANC colleagues to Zimbabwe at the height of lockdown — is failing to exercise her civilian oversight over the defence force.

Besides these indiscretions, the minister, already under a cloud for having smuggled her late son’s girlfriend into the country some years back, was slow to act on a slew of sexual harassment charges levelled against defence force members.

There is also the damning allegation that the defence intelligence unit cannot account for R4bn from its coffers.

The only question left is whether Ramaphosa has given any thought to her fitness to occupy her position.