SANDF defeated by toxicity, plus five highlights from 'Vrye Weekblad'
Here's what's hot in the latest edition of the Afrikaans digital weekly
The SANDF is in a crisis of funding, purpose and leadership.
It’s time to have a proper defence review, with wide civil society involvement and the promise of firm commitments from government and National Treasury in particular, if we are to have any hope of preventing a disastrous and very costly outcome.
SA’s armed forces are in their worst crisis in decades, driven to the brink of a disastrous loss of strategic capabilities by a combination of an ever-shrinking budget, poor leadership, and a dire mismatch between the missions they are required to perform and the resources they are given to do so.
Without an urgent intervention in the next few years, we risk the unmanaged loss of several strategic capabilities in ways that will make it difficult, if not impossible, to resurrect them in the near-to-medium-term future. At best, the SANDF will become largely undeployable, with the personnel component of the budget swallowing up all operational, training and acquisition funds.
This is over and above the looming disaster that is the potential collapse of Denel and much of the other South African defence industry, which will dramatically increase the SANDF’s costs by requiring it to import and outsource more from foreign providers and rob the country of substantial skills and export revenue.
At a time when the security situation around SA is deteriorating, particular with the emergence of the ISIS-affiliated Ansar al-Sunna insurgency in northern Mozambique, allowing the status quo to continue is reckless and dangerous.
Read the full article and more news and analysis in this week's edition of Vrye Weekblad.