SANDF defeated by toxicity, plus five highlights from 'Vrye Weekblad'

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.

Must-read articles in this week's Vrye Weekblad

>> Browse the full March 19 edition

THE WEEK IN POLITICS | Max du Preez writes about the ANC’s internal war over the public protector, the flip-flopping of the EFF and Adam Habib’s N-word.

FREE TO READ — SECRET LIVES | Introverts are wired differently. We are exhausted by too many people in one room, and we rather like our own company. But we might just be good at listening.

THE SEARCH FOR GOLDILOCKS | If this was a fairytale, inflation wouldn’t be a monster lurking in a forest so much as a Goldilocks phenomenon. We don’t want too much of it — or too little.

PLAYING IT SAFE | A string of recent meetings provide interesting clues about what we can expect from the SA Reserve Bank next week, and the prospects for interest rates.

MERRY XMAS, VIRUS | On Christmas day in 2020, two researchers' weeks-long struggle paid off: they isolated the new variant in a live coronavirus. We talked to them about their work.