Opening address by Minister of Defence and Military Veterans at the Military Veterans Indaba in Boksburg yesterday.

I AM indeed grateful to each one of you, to the various veterans associations, the Department of Military Veterans and Samva (SA Military Veterans Association), for responding to our request to hold this long overdue, but important indaba on issues affecting our military veterans.

As you may be aware, I had made an announcement during our budget vote debate in Parliament in May this year that I intended to establish a Turnaround Programme for the Department of Military Veterans. This envisaged turnaround will focus, among others, on addressing both the structural and policy matters affecting the department’s ability to fulfil its mandate.

Since then, the deputy minister and I have had various engagements with the department as well as several representatives of veterans across the country on various specific aspects of the problems we are facing.

These discussions have been isolated and dealt with varied concerns regarding the work of the department; they had not been holistic to allow us to develop a common, integrated approach on how to address all of our challenges.

In the recent past, we have also seen growing levels of frustration among the veterans themselves, and this has led to protest action aimed at highlighting some of the issues we need to address as a matter of urgency. This frustration is understandable and based on justifiable expectations that should have been addressed following the establishment of the Department of Military Veterans.

As isolated as these engagements may have been, they all, however, pointed to one real issue – that the limitations affecting the ability of the department to fulfil its mandate need to be addressed as a matter of urgency.

To do this, we require a