“We’ll mow you down’
THE SA National Defence Force is prepared to go into towns and help fight crime – but the country must be prepared to take the consequences.
“We’re not trained to fight crime, we’re trained to make war. We don’t take nonsense, if you point a gun at us, we mow you down,” General Solly Shoke told journalists yesterday at his annual Chief of the SANDF media briefing at Waterkloof Air Force Base outside Pretoria.
Police Minister Fikile Mbalula has publicly appealed for the army to be deployed into crime-ridden townships, in particular to help staunch the violent gang warfare besetting Cape Town.
Shoke refused to say whether the SANDF was preparing to deploy into urban areas, saying only “we are soldiers, we take orders, we go anywhere the country needs us”.
Flanked by his command council; the chiefs of the different services and his chief of staff, Shoke admitted that the SANDF had experienced its fair share of difficulties in 2017. Finance and more per- tinently the lack of it, was a particular issue, especially since Parliament had passed the Defence Review in 2015, but had never provided the money for the SANDF to implement it.
The budget had been shrinking each year, he said, with the biggest effect on the operational budget.
“We are robbing Peter to pay Paul, but all the time more tasks are being given to the SANDF. This is a cancer that will catch up with us.”
A major stress on the budget is the age of combat soldiers, many of whom are now older than the international norm for the ranks and positions they hold.
“It’s a legacy problem,” said Shoke, cautioning against any widescale downsizing exercise.
“When we cut members we must do it responsibly, they served with loyalty and dignity, they might be old for their ranks but we can’t throw them to the wolves,” he said, warning that with the current lack of jobs, old soldiers could fall into criminality.
The SANDF has been speaking to the departments of Home Affairs and Correctional Services, he said, to see if some of the older soldiers cannot be absorbed into their structures. The other solution remains the army’s own works regiment, where soldiers are retrained as artisans and then redeployed to maintain ageing bases, which Shoke said were deteriorating at an “unacceptable” rate.
The other major issue vexing him and his generals is the level of discipline in the SANDF, which has been blighted by reports of soldiers being held up for their weapons, weapons being sold to crime syndicates, some reserve unit officers and clerks demanding bribes to issue lucrative callups to unemployed part-time soldiers and, most recently, a soldier killing his girlfriend, also a soldier, while on deployment in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
“Discipline is a must in the SANDF,” Shoke said, “The amendment of the Military Discipline Act is before Parlia- ment because we feel military judges and commanders need to be empowered to impose heavy sanctions for disciplinary breaches.
“There is no in-between. Under our command we have weapons of war, we’re the only institution entrusted with the security of the country and its people.
“People who are ill-disciplined don’t belong here. We do dismiss them but then some of them go to court and interdict us, which doesn’t gel well.”
Another challenge, he said, was the army’s responsibilities securing South Africa’s landward borders.
There was an ongoing discussion with Home Affairs over the purported Border Management Authority.
Other issues included getting the fences along the border fixed and overcoming the challenges of arresting illegal border hoppers only to have them promptly released by the courts.
The SANDF though, he said, was making do with what it had. Through Operation Koba Tlala, military bases in rural areas would now source supplies where they were, meaningfully boosting local economies.