Mon séjour en Afrique du Sud (Cape Town)

All at sea over maritime needs The media is again publishing issues relating to security on our seas, Be proud, president tells SANDF (The Weekender, September 6-7). This seems to be prompted by whether the navy needs patrol ships and why we bought the corvettes, submarines, helicopters and weapon systems if they cannot do the job. The debate is muddled, which leads to delays in addressing urgent needs.

The essence of the muddled thinking is a lack of clarity on the different missions SA needs to fulfil at sea. There are two dimensions; one relating to national security and the other to civil security.

The national security aim is to ensure the security of the state and the sovereignty of our country. It is about war at sea and protecting us against the imperialistic ambitions of other states through our ability to apply armaments. The president made this clear during his address to the navy after his recent review. Security at sea is the sole responsibility of the South African National Defence Force which is the only lawful military force allowed to carry weapons of war. Its primary objective is to protect the republic and its territorial integrity. It functions under the constitution and within the law.

In peacetime maritime forces must prepare for war. This means training and practising to locate and identify an enemy and accurately deliver a weapon before the enemy delivers theirs. Naval commanders have their time cut out ensuring the serviceability of equipment, the training of crews and the integration of their forces to survive in combat.

The civil security dimension is about protecting ordinary people and their possessions from criminals and the dangers of the sea. It is about conserving the environment and protecting our maritime wealth. It is about creating an orderly environment where people can earn a living and enterprises can prosper.

The civil security mission has the further responsibility to meet our obligations to the international community of states. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea affords littoral states rights and privileges in their adjoining seas. SA is a signatory to the convention and a host of other treaties, protocols, conventions and agreements in which we have undertaken to do our part in creating orderliness on the oceans. They are about universal missions like search and rescue, safe navigation, trade in narcotics, countering pollution, poaching, piracy, safe ships, ensuring that there are properly trained seafarers, and so on.

These two dimensions of security at sea are fundamentally different in terms of the assets required. Combat ships and submarines are built to different specifications, fitted with different systems and are orders of magnitude more costly than vessels used for civil tasks.

Regrettably, South Africans get muddled when discussing maritime matters. We would not accept an argument that the army needs battle tanks to counter stock theft on our borders, or even that it is the army's job to do something about the stock theft. For some reason we thought that oversized corvettes armed with over-the-horizon missiles would be appropriate to counter fish poaching.