SA military not suited to anti-virus fight

THE South African National Defence Force is not suited for internal deployment, particularly where it must fight “an invisible enemy” such as the coronavirus. Its conduct while enforcing the Covid-19 lockdown has brought this reality to the fore.

The military has been trained and equipped for precisely the opposite of what President Cyril Ramaphosa has asked of it – to save lives. Its purpose is to defend the country and its people against physical, external enemies – by killing such enemies if need be.

This mismatch between defence policy and practice is fundamental to understanding the circumstances around the death of Collins Khosa, allegedly at the hands of the army and police during a Covid-19 lockdown patrol. Military affairs expert Professor Lindy Heinecken captures this issue in her book South Africa’s Post-Apartheid Military: Lost in Transition and Transformation.

Chapter 3, on the South African military’s involvement in peace missions, is particularly relevant to understanding its lack of readiness to help contain Covid-19.

She highlights the difficulties the military has in executing “secondary tasks”, when it’s “structured, trained, (and) funded” for warfare.

What are the reasons for the military’s unpreparedness? This question can be answered by giving attention to South Africa’s political and military leadership, the education and training offered to the military, and how it’s been financed.

Over the past 26 years, these leaders have failed to prepare the military for secondary roles such as peace missions, let alone to fight a virus.

They have failed to create the kind of culture that allows for the alignment of what the military does and its strategic intent. South Africa’s political leaders have purposed the military largely for conventional roles, yet they deploy it mostly for unconventional tasks such as peacekeeping, fighting crime and against Covid-19.

Heinecken says this disconnect sits at “the heart of the challenges the military started to face in the post-apartheid era”.

Education is another tool for transforming organisational culture so that an organisation is better prepared to perform its role. It was appropriate that the defence forces launched a civic education programme in 1997. This was three years after the first democratic elections in the country.

It followed the amalgamation of the then SA Defence Force, the mainstay of apartheid rule, with the military forces of the nominally independent “homelands” and those of the liberation movements.

The purpose of the civic education programme was to establish compliance among members of the new defence force “with the new democratic vision of the government (and society)”.

In short, the education and training of South Africa’s soldiers over the past 26 years has not properly prepared them for secondary roles such as peacekeeping or fighting new security threats like Covid-19. It’s no surprise, therefore, that William Gumede, of the Democracy Works Foundation, a southern African non-profit focused on the development of democracy, has called for the military’s training curriculum to be overhauled, “to make it more human rights-based”.