Mon séjour en Afrique du Sud (Cape Town)

Two years ago it was becoming quite clear that South Africa's enthusiasm for taking part in African peace support operations was outrunning its capacity - that the SANDF [South African National Defence Force] was facing serious "overstretch".

Today the situation has worsened, and the national defence force faces a very real danger of becoming a "hollow force", a force that has all the trappings but lacks the ability to conduct sustained operations.

South Africa has battalion groups, or the equivalent, in Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo a reinforced company group in Sudan's Darfur region; specialized support elements and a training team in the DRCongo; and staff officers serving with the African Union [AU] and United Nations missions in Ethiopia and Eritrea, and with the UN mission in Liberia. In addition, the government has agreed to be one of four countries to provide troops for an envisaged 10,000-strong force that the AU hopes to deploy in the eastern DRCongo to finally clear out the Rwandan guerrillas that are based there.

There are also rumours that South Africa has agreed to expand its force in Darfur to a full battalion, and the president has promised to provide training and other personnel in the Cote d'Ivoire.

That is all in line with the government's commitment to Africa and Nepad (the New Partnership for Africa's Development), and it all makes perfect sense: South Africa needs a stable and secure environment, which cannot be achieved or maintained without military commitment.

As the largest economic power in Africa, it is clearly also up to South Africa to make at the very least a commensurate contribution to that military commitment. The problem is that we are attempting to make that commitment without providing our armed forces with the funding they need for the purpose. The key issue here is that while the defence force's operational commitments have steadily expanded since 1998, its operating budget has steadily declined in real terms over the same period. That is a formula for failure.

Far worse, every new operational commitment has seen the SANDF forced to meet the initial cost out of its current budget, as additional funds are only voted later. That money cannot be taken out of salaries, nor can equipment contracts be cancelled, so money is taken from training, from maintenance or from the already inadequate research and development budget. Each time that happens, it creates a hole that is never filled.

Even the partial reimbursement from the United Nations - the African Union cannot afford to reimburse - is just that, a reimbursement: first there is a hole to fill, then, at some time in the future, a portion of that money is reimbursed and may find its way to the armed forces - if the Treasury does not squirrel it away in its notorious B7 account, never to be seen again.

The result has been that for the better part of a decade, the SANDF has been unable to train properly, to maintain its equipment properly, or to maintain its infrastructure. The army, for instance, last ran a full brigade-level exercise a decade or so ago, while the air force and the navy lack the flying hours and sea days to be truly proficient in even their primary roles; and at the level of individuals there never seems to be quite enough money to present promotion courses for all of those who need to attend them.

Another major problem is that the SANDF does not have the personnel strength to be able to meet the demands of its current operational commitments without difficulty. It has been forced to deploy some of its personnel for six months in 18, and a few particularly unlucky ones for six months in 12. That does nothing for family life; means they cannot attend courses and therefore cannot be promoted; and means that proper unit training is almost impossible, causing operational capability to decline.

The result is, inevitably, that some members attempt to dodge deployments and others begin to look for other employment, causing the SANDF to lose critical expertise and experience that it cannot replace quickly. Other armed forces have been down this road and have learned the lessons. They try to keep the sustained deployment cycles of their operational units to about six months per three years.

The army suffers the most in this respect. Its lack of personnel strength results partly from a force design that is inadequate for the commitments, but also from the fact that too many in its junior ranks are over-age, unfit or ill and not deployable. They cannot, however, be shed because there is no workable "exit mechanism", and there is no money to recruit younger personnel in addition to them.

All of the services are also suffering from the usual drain of technical and other skilled personnel that all armed forces suffer in times of peace and economic growth.

Here it has been aggravated by affirmative action policies that have driven too many whites out of the armed forces and side-lined others - and their expertise and experience with them - before they could pass on to the new generation of officers what they learned in two or three decades of service. The bill for that will be presented in some future operation, when the lack of experience, in particular, will make itself felt at an inopportune moment.

While it is going too far to say that the SANDF is falling apart, it does find itself in an unsustainable situation that must be resolved lest it result in terminal decline.

The solution cannot be to cut back South Africa's regional security role. That would be to turn our back on our neighbours, apart from undermining the regional stability that South Africa needs for its own development. The solution also cannot lie in stopping the re-equipment of the armed forces. The SANDF must be re-equipped if it is to be credible and effective, and we owe it to our troops to provide them with the equipment that enables them to perform their duties.

The solution must, therefore, be to provide the force with the funding it needs to train, equip and maintain, and to conduct the operations assigned to it.

That will require a sustained expenditure of around 2 per cent of GDP, quite possibly with a small hike above that in the short term to undo the damage that has been done since 1990. It is also imperative that the government sets aside contingency funds to cover the first phases of future peace support operations, so that those can be launched without the armed forces having to disrupt training and maintenance to do so.

That is the bad news. The good news is that much of the additional funding would be spent inside South Africa, most of it on recruiting young people to give the army the strength it needs for its role.

Some soldiers retrenched without retraining used their combat skills in crimes such as cash heists, a military trade union said on Friday.

"When soldiers are retrenched with a programme like the defence department's human resource plan and they are not retrained, they use their skills to take part in crimes like cash heists," said SA Security Forces Union (Sasfu) official Lindiwe Nkoko.

She was speaking to journalists in Pretoria about Sasfu's concerns about the low representation of black soldiers in the SA National Defence Force's (SANDF) middle management.

Nkoko said only through the retraining of retrenched soldiers and ensuring that more black soldiers were in managerial positions, would the instance of trained former soldiers taking part in crime decrease.

Nkoko said the human resource plan had been explained to soldiers as a method of "revitalising" the ageing defence force.

"What is basically happening is that older officials leaving the SANDF are being replaced with younger ones and soldiers who are older than 45 years and not in management positions are next in line to be asked to leave."

There were some soldiers who had held the same rank for close to ten years, without been trained or being given a promotion, Nkoko said.

She said the top management of the SANDF had black people who initiated progressive reforms for transformation.

"But the problem is that between them and the majority of soldiers, are white management who do not implement these plans."

The union said soldiers who wanted to take part in a Congress of SA Trade Unions (Cosatu) march on Monday , would be doing so in their private capacity.

"Sasfu is not affiliated with Cosatu but those of our members who wish to strike may do so as private citizens," said Nkoko.

She said Sasfu had never taken a decision to strike, explaining that Cosatu had decided to march on the military union's behalf after attending a Sasfu meeting earlier this year.

Sasfu members were advised to "cover themselves" by taking leave if they intended to strike on Monday.

Nkoko said Sasfu had more than 10,000 members countrywide.

SANDF puts best foot forward in war on AIDS pandemic Strict United Nations resolution encourages member states to implement programmes to combat the disease, often rife among soldiers Deputy Political Editor SINCE Defence Minister Mosiuoa Lekota shocked Parliament with the revelation that at least 23% of military personnel were HIV positive, the South African Military Health Service has ensured that all HIVinfected staff have access to antiretroviral medicines.

At the time of Lekota's announcement in 2003, the cabinet had just decided to initiate the Herculean task of providing HIV-positive South Africans with comprehensive clinical management of their illness.

Because the foreign deployment of troops is of strategic importance to government, which is heavily involved in peace missions on the African continent, it is essential that the South African National Defence Force implement an HIV programme to address the concerns of the United Nations (UN).

The UN Security Council passed a resolution in July 2000 calling on member states to address the HIV epidemic in the military, saying the military community was considered a high-risk environment for HIV transmission. The UN considers military populations as being among the communities most susceptible to HIV infection.

Some of the risk factors increasing their susceptibility are the fact that they are mostly young and sexually active; are often away from their homes; are governed more by peer pressure than social convention; are inclined to feel invincible and take risks; and are surrounded by opportunities for casual sex.

In addition, HIV transmission is considered to occur with higher frequency where other sexually transmitted infections (STI) are present.

Peacetime STI infection rates among military populations have been found to be two to five times higher than in civilian societies.

Evidence suggests that some soldiers consider the acquisition of an STI to be a symbol of sexual prowess and proof of their manhood. According to the UN, the military risk for acquiring STIs increases by as much as 100 times that of civilians during wartime.

The African Union (AU) has adopted the UN resolution and called on its regional bodies, the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas) and the Southern African Development Community (SADC) to respond.

The South African Military Health Service launched Project Phidisa (Heal) in 2003, with the co-operation of the US departments of defence and health and human services; and senior defence force officers in Ecowas and SADC countries.

They devised a plan aimed at prevention, treatment, care, support, research, monitoring and surveillance.

Soldiers are not forced to take an HIV test, but those who volunteer for testing receive comprehensive support, along with their partners, at the state's expense.

However, so far the South African pilot programme has only attracted 2000 members of the SANDF. Project Phidisa operates three clinics across SA. One more will be launched on August 15 and a fifth site is planned for opening at the beginning of next year. Addressing the third annual Phidisa conference in Cape Town last week, Deputy Defence Minister Mluleki George expressed optimism that, in time, the clinics would provide the entire country with answers to difficult questions of the appropriateness, effectiveness and efficacy of the clinical management of HIV and AIDS. The clinics will serve as a research base with biomedical and public health research capacity. The SANDF is using the facilities to address other health issues of critical importance for military force preparedness and that can be of wider relevance to the South African health services, says George.

He says the project aims to find answers to the critical problems of the safe use of antiretroviral agents in the management of AIDS.

It will also build capacity within the military health services to conduct research on other infectious diseases.

SANDF spokesman Lt-Col Louis Kirstein says the soldiers are not being used as guinea pigs all participants enter the programme voluntarily with and understand its objectives.

The success rate of the project has not yet been quantified, and the defence department will not disclose the expenses incurred. However, George says it has the full support of the state and the defence ministry.

George says that the SANDF's surgeon general, Lt-Gen Vijay Ramlakan, will redouble the efforts to staff the project adequately and ensure that all six sites are performing above expectation.

A young Polokwane man accused of murdering a retired SA National Defence Force general two years ago told the Pretoria High Court on Wednesday he had acted in anger because the general insulted him, and had not meant to kill him.

Joel Tebogo Mogale, 20, admitted that he had attacked retired Lt-Gen Gert Johannes Petrus de Wachter, 74, with an iron pipe at his home in Waterkloof Ridge, Pretoria, in August 2003, but denied murdering or robbing him.

Mogale testified that De Wachter had employed him that day to wash his car, but suddenly started swearing at him after he had finished the work.

He became angry, "lost control" and attached the man with an iron pipe.

When the general fled into his house, he followed and continued the assault.

Mogale said he had dragged the general to the dining room and wrapped his head in a towel because there was blood on the floor and he did not want blood to leak onto the carpet.

He claimed he had tied up his victim because he wanted keys to get out of the property and had dressed in De Wachter's clothes because his own were covered in blood. He had taken De Wachter's cellphone "because it started ringing," he added.

"I was panic stricken, as I had no intention to act as I did. I was extremely angry. That's why I took his clothes and cellphone," he said.

The court earlier admitted a statement Mogale made to police, in which he said he had scaled a fence at the house, waited inside and attacked De Wachter.

De Wachter's son, Johan, testified that his father was very aware of security and would not have employed someone off the street to wash his car. He said his father had a prior appointment that morning, but never arrived at his destination. He discovered his father's body after trying to contact him but receiving no answer.

He never saw any sign that a car had been washed at his father's house and only discovered the murder weapon hidden in one of his father's cupboards a month later.

The prosecution argued that Mogale's version should be rejected, as it differed no only from his statement to police, but also from an earlier version presented during a trial-within-a-trial about the admissibility of his police statement.

The defence, however, argued that Mogale's version was reasonably possibly true and that he should be convicted of culpable homicide and theft, as he had clearly not meant to kill his victim.

The trial was postponed to August 22 for judgment.