Mon séjour en Afrique du Sud (Cape Town)

Bemoaning the scant strategic attention paid to the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) by the tripartite alliance since 1994, the SACP said even the Polokwane conference confined itself to the welfare of military veterans.

Yet indications were that the technical and skills situation in much of the SANDF was getting worse while morale was low, said the SACP in a position paper prepared ahead of the ruling alliance's economic summit next month.

However, the party believes developments in the military were part of a bigger trend in which many African National Congress (ANC) "deployees" sought to advance their personal interests, "for the purposes of primary accumulation", to the detriment of the much larger objective.

Apart from contributing to the "hollowing out" of the state, this accentuated the "dangerous" proliferation of armed private companies.

Such privatisation of the state was worse in the police, however. The SACP believed transformation of the criminal justice system must be led from the ground up -- through the establishment of street committees, among other measures.

It said reports pointed to a situation where much of the remaining black senior command in the military was content with "a ceremonial role and endless overseas conferences". This left the mass of black junior officers feeling marginalised and abandoned.

"No less than any other sector, the defence sector must come under political strategic evaluation, co-ordination and control," said the SACP.

The party argued that the alliance had allowed the arms deal controversy "to become the centre piece while abandoning serious strategic and technical military analysis to think-tanks dominated by former apartheid-era military intelligence operatives and officers".

Relevant although this may be, it needed "ideological filtering at the very least".