Mon séjour en Afrique du Sud (Cape Town)

The changing African and global landscapealters the role and mission of SouthAfrica’s military, writes Michael Schmidt

The government has finally revealed progress on a defence policy rethink which takes into account new challenges like peacekeeping in Africa – but the defence industry has questioned the secrecy under which the review has been shrouded.

The rethink comes against a backdrop of a shrunken post-apartheid arms industry, which has seen a change in South Africa’s post-apartheid defence priorities – but it remains an important sector, providing about 16 000 jobs and turning over approximately R10 billion a year, 40% of which is derived from exports.

Yet some industry sources say they no longer trust the government after it “reneged” on its policy commitment to support certain key military technologies by selling off several defence firms which possessed cutting-edge knowledge to foreign corporations.

This policy reversal saw, among other things, Britain and Sweden’s purchase of key armoured vehicle and electronic warfare technologies, as well as the United States buying the right to manufacture what was once the industry’s trump-card: long-range artillery ammunition.

Critics say the country’s arsenal-building capacity has no notably strong suit left other than its ability to manufacture missiles like Denel’s A-Darter and Umkhonto systems.

Others warn that surrendering South Africa’s electronic warfare capability to foreign suppliers could undermine the military’s operational autonomy and thus the country’s sovereignty.

Simphiwe Hamilton, chairman of industry umbrella body the SA Aerospace Maritime and Defence Industries Association (AMD), says the sale of equity by the state-owned arms industry to international partners in exchange for technology transfer was cause for concern and “needs to be managed in a manner that assures the SANDF of their sovereignty, whilst ensuring the industry’s sustainability and profitability”.

Defence analyst Leon Engelbrecht says some local defence companies were muttering about disinvesting. Others have beaten their swords into ploughshares, quitting the military arena altogether to focus on civilian contracts. The reason for this, they argue, is that policy on the expanded public works programme and other civil infrastructure projects is more reliable.

The main issue at stake was that, until a Department of Defence briefing on August 30 arranged by AMD and attended by almost 60 industry delegates, no one in the arms industry had any idea whether government’s planned policy shift would affect their livelihood.

“What emerged,” at the department briefing, Hamilton says, was “a light shift from a defence industry policy driven by what capabilities exist … to what the country’s defence requirements are.” And those requirements have changed significantly over the years, he says.

The country’s current defence policy is laid out in three documents – the 1996 Defence White Paper, the 1998 Defence Review and the 1999 White Paper on Defence-related Industry – which were drawn up after having been exhaustively workshopped with the military, industry and civil society, including the “peacenik” lobby.

The policy was drawn up after what Engelbrecht describes as “unprecedented public input”, including from organisations as diverse as AMD, the anti-militarist lobby and the Ceasefire Campaign.

Major-General Len le Roux, now retired from the air force and working for the Institute for Security Studies (ISS), was among those who drafted the current policy.

“The department and the parliamentary portfolio committee on defence went out of their way to consult the public, industry and all stakeholders and interest groups in terms of defence policy formation during the years leading up to the White Papers and the Defence Review,” he said.

“Since then it has become obvious that … a lot of the enthusiasm and optimism about peace coming to Africa with the end of apartheid, the expectation of a utopian period in South Africa with no crime, has not happened.”

But even though work was being done towards the goal of creating an overarching national security policy that will integrate defence, policing, foreign relations and related matters, the lack of such a policy at the moment provided fertile ground for confusion, he says.

By 2004, Thandi Modise, then-chair of the standing committee on defence, and the parliamentary portfolio committee were both calling for a review of defence policy.

The review process began in 2005 and by the time of his budget speech early last year, Defence Minister Mosiuoa Lekota told Parliament the review would probably be ready in September.

But it took about a year for the AMD to bring the department to the table to discuss progress on the review.

“It is extremely sad that the transparency and co-operation in the defence review process has been totally thrown overboard and the Department of Defence has gone back to the pre-1994 era way of doing things in secret,” Le Roux says.”

Hamilton agrees that the “guarded manner” in which the department had dealt with the review had been “a source of concern”, but he felt assured in the wake of last week’s briefing that “there will be ample opportunity for the industry to engage with proposed changes”.