Defence Forces 101 - Five steps Minister Angie Motshekga must take to fix South Africa's SANDF

Dear Minister Angie Motshekga,

So, the elections are done and you’ve just been appointed by your government to run the country’s Department of Defence. As you have zero experience in military affairs, the criticism of you is widespread and voluminous.

But fret not! You need not be a bemedalled field marshal to run the department at the highest level. In fact, in many cases, that can be a bit of a liability. Ask a fighter pilot about the logistics requirements – at a policy level – of an artillery brigade and they’ll likely come up mute, or ask for more aircraft.

We do need more aircraft, but don’t worry about that just yet.

So, with 15 years of covering the defence beat in South Africa, here are my top five things that should be on your defence minister dream board.

Soldiers from the SANDF with the South African Police Service patrol Khayelitsha hotspots on 22 July 2021 in Cape Town, South Africa. (Photo: Gallo Images / Brenton Geach)

A South African Police Service (SAPS) and South African National Defence Force (SANDF) joint operation on illegal mining in Durban Deep on 29 November 2023 in Roodepoort, South Africa. (Photo: Gallo Images / Sharon Seretlo)

1. Start a new defence review today

The country’s defence forces are in dire need of a new defence review. The last one started in about 2012 and continued into legislative reality. The massive document contained every detail about how the defence force, the defence industry and the civil society around it should be structured.

It was truly a magnificent policy document, containing the recommendations of many of the country’s top defence minds.

The only problem was that the document hinged on a promise by one of your predecessors, whose name starts with an “L” and ends with “Sisulu”, that the budget to fund this policy was forthcoming.

It wasn’t. And it perhaps never was. The tendrils of State Capture were already well within defence, and with the South African economy tanking harder than a Leopard 2 in eastern Ukraine (that is an armour joke), there was never any consideration beyond the Department of Defence for more budget to fund the country’s defined goals for the future.

This has left the South African National Defence Force (SANDF), and the attached organisations, in a complete free-fall to the bottom. And, as minister, it’s probably useful to know from the start that the “bottom” in defence equates to literal lives lost.

That’s where we are now in 2024. At the bottom, or certainly starting to circle the drain.

So, for the first action as minister, for the love of God, commission the start of a new defence review.

Except, this time, let’s base it in reality: that the defence budget will not significantly increase and that it may in fact decline.

How do you do this? Well, fortunately, your deputy minister (Brigadier (ret) Holomisa, not the other one) can be a big help in this regard. And, since you’re now friends with the GNU-DA, perhaps consult with the former DA spokesperson on defence, Kobus Marais. There are people around you with a wealth of knowledge and experience who can quickly help in getting this very im­­portant ball rolling. Hell, send me an email. I have some ideas too.

Which leads to step two.

Members of the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) inspect Ndofaya Mall after the looting and violent protests on 21 July 2021 in Soweto, South Africa. The violent protests spread from KwaZulu-Natal after the incarceration of the former president Jacob Zuma. (Photo: Gallo Images / Sharon Seretlo)

2. Ignore your generals and talk to the junior officers and enlisted personnel

Your officer cadre have some good eggs there. But, by and large, many are long due for retirement. For them and their R80,000 per month salaries (plus benefits), the status quo is just fine.

Like any military, the real heart and soul of your newfound ministry lies in the sergeants, the corporals, the captains and the majors. Perhaps some colonels too, while we’re at it, but really it’s the youth in the defence force who are the driven, ambitious go-getters and can give you a no-bullshit assessment of how things are going.

Set up a road show, send your staff to chat with these ranks across branches, and without their superiors present, and get some frank, honest feedback on the real state of the defence forces.

You’ll soon get a picture of everything from the toilet paper quality to the outdated avionics software on our fighter jets. This information is invaluable, and you won’t find it in a 300-slide deck from a general.

In all my years of speaking with our soldiers from various ranks, it’s always been the junior officers (lieutenant to major) and the NCOs (that’s a corporal or sergeant in normie terms) who have the bright ideas. If you want to know how it was, speak to your senior commanders. If you want to know how it is and could be, speak to the rest.

Why is this important? Well, as a perceived “outsider” with no experience in this world, that kind of information is termed 'Situational Awareness' in military parlance. It helps to lift the fog of war around the SANDF and empowers you with the God’s honest truth about the state of things among the rank and file.

Also, it helps you to avoid the bullshit. Which leads to step three.

Angie Motshekga during the swearing-in ceremony of the new national executive members at Cape Town International Convention Centre on 3 July 2024 in Cape Town, South Africa. (Photo: Gallo Images / Misha Jordaan)

3. Avoid the bullshit

Now several weeks into your tenure as defence minister, you’ve probably already been fêted by every Tom, Dick and Sally punting anything from the Panzer-smasher 3000 to the Rebel-defeater MkIII system. You’ll be hounded from pillar to post by the “industry” internally (Armscor, Denel) and externally (Russia, America, China, your cousin with an engineering diploma), all pushing some wonder tool or other.

To explain: there are certainly many tools of defence that need acquiring or modernisation, and many of the recommendations you receive will be good ones. But they are all delivered under the current state of the defence force, in isolation from other branches and their needs, and heedless of just how limited the budget truly is.

Fortunately, you’ve taken this article to heart and already implemented Step 1. In commissioning a new defence review, a lot of this bullshit will be weeded out and the real needs of a future defence force can be laid out in a clear, sane way.

The defence budget is down to the marrow inside the bone now, and there are simply no resources to waste on stupid acquisitions. Indeed, if you’ve done your job well over the next five years or so, or until the GNU explodes, you will have removed entire lines of equipment and their costs. That might irk some of your generals, but thankfully you’ve also read Step 2 and are not really paying too much mind to their brass-chested grumblings.

Avoiding the bullshit will also let you have your house in order when you turn to Step 4.

The SANDF during Day 1 of the Rand Show at Johannesburg Expo Centre Nasrec on 28 March 2024 in Johannesburg, South Africa. (Photo: Gallo Images / Frennie Shivambu)

4. Sit down with Treasury and explain to them how to ‘military’

National Treasury has historically treated the defence department like any other. Unfortunately, this translates into arbitrary budget assignments and oversight that simply make no sense in the defence context.

Why, for example, does Treasury have a say in how the UN refunds from our SANDF deployment to the DRC are allocated, and when?

There is a dire need to sit down with Treasury and work out a budgetary framework that recognises the unique nature of defence and that its spending requirements cannot be cherry-picked by non-Department of Defence non-experts, and perhaps figure out what this looks like in writing. Even a memorandum of understanding at this point would be helpful in clearing that up.

Treasury is treating your department with a funding horizon that spans a year or three. In defence, anything under 10 years is rushed. Your budgets should look that way. So piecemeal funding priorities do not always take precedence over the longer-term requirements. We have shiny new uniforms, for example, but a critical underfunding in transport aircraft. One can be done quickly, and the other takes decades to un­­tangle fully. Explain this to the bean-counters. And then make them sign something to agree to change things.

Once tea is finished with Treasury, your next appointment is waiting:

A sailor during the Women's Month commemoration at Air Force Mobile Deployment Wing in Valhalla on 25 August 2023 in Pretoria, South Africa. (Photo: Gallo Images / Frennie Shivambu)

5. Decide who the police force is

The SANDF has long been the whipping boy for the police force’s failings. Everyone from the government to the former-opposition DA screams for the SANDF to deploy to the streets to fight gangs, defeat Covid, watch the borders and guard substations or, in the latest tragic case, abandoned mineshafts.

This is all South African Police Service work. The SANDF has been doing a lot of these tasks without the funding to do so. The result is what we witnessed this month, with soldiers potentially self-asphyxiating while guarding a mineshaft from zama zamas.

Better training and cold-weather equipment would have prevented this from happening. So too if the police were doing this job. Or, hell, maybe even private security.

This tragedy could have been avoided with a duty officer or NCO paying attention, sending radio checks regularly, even actually inspecting the guards to make sure they were awake. None of this appeared to have happened or, if it did, was not done enough.

The best way to fix this is simply not to do it. It’s police work, or it’s private security work. Ordinary soldiers neither have the power of arrest, nor do they have any of the other training a police officer has. So, why make it your problem? As defence minister, you can quickly fix this by simply opting not to do it.

The SANDF’s role as the police-with-teeth needs to end, or it needs to receive whatever the police’s budget is for this instead. Soldiers are meant to defend the nation from internal and external threats, not chase fence-jumping undocumented migrants or guard mineshafts in freezing containers.

It might be tempting to take on these tasks to maintain “usefulness” by the government. And there may well be occasion for the military to intervene in assisting the police. But this relationship has now become abusive, and it’s time to pack bags and leave it.

Take heart. The position of defence minister does not need to be an arduous quest resulting in outright quiet-quitting by you and your staff. Think of it as a ministry that has sunk to rock bottom, and any kind of effort at improvement would be a step in the right direction.

These steps are relatively easy to achieve in a political sense. They just require a bit of delegation, ministerial staff who won’t eat the crayons, and a thick skin to take all the inevitable criticism.

Our budget is minuscule, but there are many countries across the globe that have done amazing things with similar figures. You might need to sell off some equipment, and forcefully retire some of the old and lame from the upper ranks, but all of this is very doable. DM

John Stupart is Daily Maverick’s newsletter editor. He is the co-founder of the African Defence Review. He holds a master's degree in War Studies from King’s College, London.

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.