Opinion

Somewhere on a lonely border, staring down a poacher or smuggler or thief...

16 December 2018 - 00:00 By COLONEL MARTIN GOPANE

As South Africans prepare for the festive season, the time of the year when we relax and spend time with our loved ones, not everyone will be able to relax - not if the rest of the country wants to enjoy their Christmas and see in the New Year in safety.
Our borders - all 4,471km of them, from the Atlantic in the west with Namibia, all the way across Botswana and Zimbabwe, down past Mozambique and around eSwatini - have to be secured.
The army does that, ensuring a 10km-deep cordon sanitaire. We call it Operation Corona, and we have been doing it since the cabinet decided to give this responsibility back to the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) in 2009. Borders need to be protected even when our country is not at war, to prevent criminal activities and the uncontrolled traffic of undocumented people.
In Mpumalanga, where I command the joint tactical headquarters - which includes securing a border of 780km from halfway through the Kruger National Park down to eSwatini - this also includes protecting our natural resources, like rhinos and elephants, from poachers.
The SANDF believes the optimum troop strength to secure our landward borders is 22 infantry companies. Parliament, though, has only allocated us 15 companies. Here in Mpumalanga, I have three companies.
They're great soldiers, all of them, well trained and highly motivated, doing a difficult job in the extreme heat of the lowveld where the terrain is extremely hilly with dense bush and rocks.
We recently received a consignment of Troop Packs, specially modified Toyota Land Cruisers that greatly expand our mobility, increasing both the amount of terrain we can cover effectively and the speed with which we can respond to incidents.
They help us to perform our tasks, which range from combating poachers in the north to apprehending and checking undocumented persons in the south, stopping car syndicates from smuggling vehicles into Mozambique and criminals trying to bring contraband, counterfeit goods, alcohol and drugs into SA.
Each of these tasks has its own unique challenges.
We work very closely with the police, the department of home affairs and the South African Revenue Service in our security cluster, as well as SANParks in the Kruger National Park. We have to, because the army can't do everything on its own. The fence is a case in point. In the Kruger Park, SANParks helps to maintain it. To the south, this becomes a department of public works issue - and we have to get the fence fixed because in some places it doesn't exist at all, and we certainly don't have the budget to fix it.
We do all of this on limited budgets and still we invest in the local economy, which is why it is galling when we are not supported by local businesses in return. Take tyres, for example. The terrain we cover is unforgiving. Recently I hosted a two-day media trip. We burst four tyres in the process, moving slowly down the border line. If we were in hot pursuit, we would have burst even more. When I look at the money that's allocated for tyres and I google the price of tyres, I find that they correlate, yet when we go to suppliers approved by the procurement process, I find we are paying several times more than what was budgeted.
It's a bitter irony, because it is their environment that we are trying to secure, their businesses that we are literally putting our lives on the line for. We are given equipment that we must look after and we must maintain in order to do our jobs - and we are paying local businesses to help us do just that, whether it is supplying food or servicing vehicles.
We are doing our very best to hold the line and plug the gaps, but we need everyone to work together on this, whether it is a government cluster or private-public partnership.
As Christmas approaches, we will be on high alert on our borders. Criminals will be doubling their efforts to get stolen cars out of the country, and drugs, alcohol and counterfeit goods in - and we will be doubling down on our efforts to deter them. By the middle of November, we had confiscated almost R30m in stolen vehicles, more than R11m in counterfeit goods and almost R2m in drugs.
The poachers will be looking for an early Christmas bonus, too. It's been another bloody year in the park - 344 rhinos and 65 elephants were slaughtered by mid-November, but we have also arrested 400 poachers with their high-powered rifles and their axes.
My Christmas message - on behalf of all my troops - is that if the poachers want to enjoy the festive season like the rest of the world, they should think about staying home. If they don't, they might be spending Christmas behind bars - or even worse.
• Col Gopane is the officer commanding joint tactical headquarters Mpumalanga, South African National Defence Force..

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