‘The situation is bad’: State hopes 25,000 troops will douse the flames of the insurrection

Defence Minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula was praised by MPs when she told a parliamentary portfolio committee on Wednesday that the SA National Defence Force (SANDF) will increase its deployment to trouble spots to 25,000. This is the SANDF’s biggest deployment since 1994, according to Darren Olivier, director at African Defence Review. 

He pointed out on Twitter that this number “means reaching to the very back of the cupboard and taking everything that can move, no matter the cost or sustainability. It leaves nothing in reserve & halts all other SANDF duties & commitments. It’s a reflection of just how desperate things are.” 

Some opposition MPs have requested a deployment of 75,000, which was a number incorrectly mentioned before as the deployment during the Level 5 lockdown, but Mapisa-Nqakula said 25,000 was a compromise and up from the 10,000 troops the SANDF originally planned to deploy. 

“The situation is bad in KwaZulu-Natal,” the minister said in a marked change of tone from four days before, when she said a troop deployment wasn’t necessary because there was no war. 

On Monday President Cyril Ramaphosa announced the deployment of 2,500 troops, of which 1,000 went to KwaZulu-Natal. Of these, 800 were deployed in the eThekwini Metro, mostly at key points such as the airport and hospitals, Mapisa-Nqakula said. 

She admitted that the government had been caught unawares over the large-scale looting of malls, which is why soldiers weren’t sent there, while the police response proved to be woefully inadequate. 

The mere presence of the army could have prevented the massive amount of damage done to businesses, and the food security crisis that has resulted from the cleaning out of supermarket shelves by the mobs and the closing of highways to freight trucks. 

Mapisa-Nqakula told MPs that when the army arrives the trouble-makers usually leave, even if only until the soldiers head off. 

The most devastating admission of all, however, was when she said about the mall looting: “There was intelligence, but I think it came too late.” She said the security cluster did not have information that malls would be looted, even though there were social media posts to this effect.

“When we went to secure the national key points, it never occurred to us that we should move into areas like malls, because there is always a contract between malls and private security companies,” she said. 

“What we have learnt is for police to have regular contact with private security at the malls. They are the ones with the first action and should link up with police.”

But the penny only dropped on Monday that police and private security companies at malls should actually have channels of communication and cooperation. They never had this before. “It was an eye-opener,” Mapisa-Nqakula said.

See this interactive map below - you can click on the red hot spots for specific details of the areas, and can zoom in using your mouse.