John Matisonn: Govt policy allowed generals to go rogue

Key topics:Civilian oversight failure allowed military and police leaders to act uncheckedRamaphosa cabinet relied on inquiries instead of active crisis managementDefence policy drift undermined foreign policy, budgets, and military readiness.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By John Matisonn.Defence Minister Angie Motshekga set up an inquiry to answer a question that should be clear from a single phone call to a subordinate. Worse, she should not have needed to make the call if she was doing her job as Defence Minister diligently.Where was she the day the naval exercises started? Were neither she nor her staff following the exercises? Was nobody from the ministry or the department monitoring the event? What was more important for the minister and her staff to do that day?Civilian control of all ministries -- especially the security ministers -- should be hands-on enough to know who takes part in something as significant as a naval exercise with two of the most powerful militaries in the world, Russia and China, let alone considering the controversy over Iran’s participation. But it wasn’t. It’s the pattern of president Ramaphosa’s government. This was true of the 2023 Lady R incident that also led to a formal inquiry. The minister should have been able to make one call to the highest relevant military officer, who would go down the line until they found out what was loaded on that Russian ship.These two cases are of extremely high importance because the Trump administration and before it the Biden administration made them so. But the same cabinet failure was evident in the revelations of Kwaulu-Natal police commissioner General Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi about top level decisions in the police force. .President Ramaphosa and police minister Senzo Mchunu had ample opportunities to recognise that there was a crisis over the disbanding of the political killings task team, and that Mkhwanazi, a provincial police commissioner, was digging in against his political leader, the minister.Mchunu and the police commissioner had been informed that this was a brewing crisis. They should have asked who had taken over the caseload of investigations, and got to the bottom of the conflict rocking the highest levels of the force without waiting for a commission of inquiry. They didn’t.Thanks to presidential spokesperson Vincent Magwenya we now know that military exercises are planned without the involvement of either the presidency or the department of international relations and cooperation.At the weekend Magwenya revealed that the SANDF plans military exercises without he involvement of the presidency or Dirco. Perhaps that explains how the defence force chief, General Rudzani Maphwanya, was allowed to make foreign policy statements in Iran that could cost South Africans tens of thousands of jobs.Sometime in the last 26 years such a policy was issued. It’s absurd. By its nature, Defence policy must be in lockstep with the country’s foreign policy, which are led by the president and Dirco. This could let the generals off the hook, though there is still no explanation for the failure to implement the president’s direct order to exclude Iran once it was conveyed. The underlying ills in the Defence Department are serious and have never been resolved. Budgets are cut every year, so that as little as less than ten percent of the equipment bought in the extravagant arms deal is in service. This makes the Defence Review of 2015 out of date, though it’s not clear to me how much of it was ever applied..Each year the annual ritual of Defence officials saying they can’t function because the budget is too small and Treasury says we’re broke is repeated, but the force does not adapt. Since it’s a conflict between two ministries, only the president can put his foot down, but there is no sign of that.So what will happen is that the board of inquiry will point a finger at someone. If it’s the head of the navy, Vice-Admiral Monde Lobese, he could be a fall guy, but the earlier complaints he’s been making about the budget will likely be ignored.Meanwhile it appears that we barely have a navy to participate, a fact underlined by the secrecy surrounding what actual South African vessel or vessels were seaworthy enough to take part.South Africa’s armed forces were at crisis point long before our humiliating defeat in the Democratic Republic of Congo last year, a fact that the other countries involved in the exercise, Russia and China, had no reason to point out since our symbolic participation and access to the Cape sea route were what they were after.This saga has been a litany of embarrassments.The appalling human rights carnage of protesters in Iran since late December did not sparked withdrawal from Iran’s inclusion in the naval exercises. Nor was the government sensitive to the real damage to South African jobs from alienating the US and putting them in the right. There was the obvious breakdown in the chain of command leading to a loss of civilian control of the armed forces, and the fact that the president and defence minister didn’t know or at least react to Iran’s participation, which they should have been aware of, in real time.What more will it take to get serious reform of our military?

John Matisonn: Govt policy allowed generals to go rogue

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