BIG READ: SA soldiers had no business in DRC

SA’s military crisis in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is a consummation of so much government decay that it cannot be solved meaningfully without major reform beyond what even the government of national unity (GNU) has in its sights.

This is the second time SA has lost troops in what appears to have been a conflict it did not understand, supporting an unreliable army that left our soldiers fighting their battle while they fled.

The first was the Battle of Bangui in the Central African Republic (CAR) 12 years ago, the worst SA National Defence Force (SANDF) disaster since democracy, in which 15 soldiers died. Afterwards, media attention was short-lived. No heads rolled, in part because the decisions came from the top — from then-president Jacob Zuma.

Two years later, the government-commissioned Defence Review of 2015 shone a bright red light, calling it a failure of foreign policy as much as defence logistics.

The review warned that the lesson had not been learnt, which meant it would happen again. Now it has. 

Bangui disaster 

The government’s own report reached this stark conclusion about the Battle of Bangui:

“In many mature democracies, such catastrophic strategic failure probably would have toppled the government.” 

Its critique was comprehensive: the problem was not just lack of appropriate equipment, or its local ally’s gross dereliction of duty, but an abject failure of both strategy and effectiveness. SA soldiers fought without adequate guiding intelligence or “the well-planned political and military backing to which they were entitled”.

The battle began when Seleka rebels approached the CAR capital, and the local army disappeared. The SANDF’s six years training the local army yielded nothing. SA soldiers fought bravely, skilfully — and alone.

“SA foreign policy did not map out a clear pathway for bringing in the SANDF as a policy instrument, but the SANDF nonetheless became a prominent feature of the country’s foreign policy,” the 2015 Defence Review found.  

The day our troops left, the CAR president fled the capital for good.

This was not an isolated failure in an otherwise well-oiled machine. “The defence force is in a critical state of decline,” concluded the 2015 Defence Review chairperson Roelf Meyer, citing “the inability to meet current standing defence commitments and the lack of critical mobility”.

So alarmed was the review panel that it called on the government to make a choice.

“Left unchecked, and at present funding levels, this decline will severely compromise and further fragment the defence capability.... [It must have] either a greater budget allocation or a significantly scaled-down level of ambition and commitment.”

The government did not choose. And since 2015, previous defence ministers have admitted the problems only got worse.

Yet our government has done it again, and it will not be toppled. Who wants to see the GNU fail? If we don’t, it’s time to face reality.

And this is the reality: 

Each year when the defence budget comes before parliament, the minister, the generals, the arms company lobbyists and defence analysts blame the funding shortage for their failure to maintain most of our ships, planes, submarines and helicopters. They mention legitimate complaints that we also don’t have some equipment we really need, like suitable cargo planes, or in-flight refuelling capacity.

Then comes the turn of the National Treasury and the finance minister, who point out that SA cannot afford more, given the needs of the poor.

Everyone has covered their back: Defence has blamed the Treasury to explain its failure to have a basic functioning navy and air force. And the Treasury has demonstrated its care with public funds, thus protecting its  turf. 

Everybody has done their job, and the job is shadow boxing — while the military malfunction continues.

Everyone who wants  to know is fully aware that billions are being squandered each year on services that can’t do what they are supposed to do, yet nothing changes.

This time, the defence department and the generals have again spoken up on cue. The crisis means they must at last get a bigger budget, they demand. Of course, they may be right. In fact, they are definitely right — if the ambitions of the government remain.

But was the intervention wise in the first place? Surely, the outcome casts serious doubt. If future interventions are truly necessary and properly evaluated, can SA afford this scale of intervention?

But why should SA give the SANDF as now constituted more money when they have failed to use what they have correctly? Almost the entire fleet of the notorious arms deal’s jets, helicopters, submarines and corvettes is not in service. Armies constantly reprioritise based on changing resources. Why has there been no effective interim plan, since budget tightening has gone on for decades?

Meanwhile, our expanding number of generals live a charmed life, demanding red carpets and a level of pomp unheard of under apartheid. 

What is the conflict really about? 

It may be a coincidence that the putsch in Goma happened while the world is distracted by Washington’s determination to wreak “shock and awe” on China, Canada, Mexico, Panama, and now SA. World attention is elsewhere.

Back on the ground, SA fought alongside a ragtag “coalition” of militias, including 288 white Romanian mercenaries and a group formed out of perpetrators of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. It includes 2,000 troops sent by the Burundi government, which has its separate beef with Rwanda.

There are separate UN and Southern African Development Community (Sadc) peace-enforcing forces. The Congolese military authorities in Goma also recruited a collection of militias known as the Wazalendo (or patriots in Swahili). 

To fight a battle like this, our troops need air support of various kinds, almost none of which is operational. We have enough jets, but almost none are in service because of a lack of maintenance and pilot air hours.

On the other side, the M23 rebels — trained in Rwanda, and supported from the beginning by Rwandan arms, troops and logistics — are the latest configuration of Tutsi-dominated insurgents formed in the civil war of the 1990s.

The battle-hardened M23 are backed by the most experienced sub-Saharan army, Rwanda. Rwandan President Paul Kagame’s interest in Goma is not just the welfare of Tutsi Congolese. The Goma area is home to some of the most sought after minerals in the world.

In April 2024, M23 seized one of the world’s most productive coltan concessions. The ore — from which tantalum is made — is used to manufacture the capacitors used in most smartphones and computers.

A UN report estimates that 120 tonnes of the precious mineral are mined every month and exported to Rwanda. It’s one of the richest coltan deposits in the world, whose production is estimated to account for 15% of the world’s supply and half of Congolese exports.

Rwanda does not have coltan, but coltan is one of the minerals that show up in Rwanda’s export list.

Partly because of the valuable minerals, some Rwandans dream of a “greater Rwanda”, claiming the Kivu provinces of DRC were ancient Rwandan lands, once ruled by Rwanda. Rwanda is a very small country with a border very close to Goma and the mines, and a president hell-bent on increasing his country’s power.

More than 4,000 Rwandan personnel are now in the vicinity, according to the UN and the International Crisis Group. The Guardian recently claimed the number is as high as 7,000.

But that doesn’t mean Rwanda and its ally, M23, are the sole villains.

Former president Thabo Mbeki has warned that the M23, however unsavoury, is only part of the problem. A substantial local Congolese population, the Banyamulenge, have legitimate grievances against the government in Kinshasa. Some are part of M23.

The Banyamulenge include both Hutus and Tutsis and speak Rwandan. Their history in eastern Congo did not start with the Rwandan genocide in 1994 — it started more than 100 years earlier, to at least the rule of Belgian King Leopold, probably even before that.

While they had sided with different Congolese rulers, “many never got full citizenship, were not eligible for state or provincial posts, had no voting rights and, most importantly, no land rights”, political scientist professor Klaus Bachmann, Polish-based author of several authoritative books on Rwanda told Business Day.

Refusing to issue them with identity documents put them at constant risk of deportation, even if their families lived there for generations.

This was one reason for the rebellion in 1996 that propelled Laurent Kabila all the way to Kinshasa and the overthrow of president Mobutu Sese Seko.  

Kabila had been heading a movement ostensibly to overthrow the government since the early 1960s. In 1965, Kabila was the local partner of Che Guevara, Argentinian-Cuban revolutionary, who came to Congo with the darkest-skinned Cubans he could recruit to advance his dream of world revolution.

When Guevara gave up the battle to overthrow the Kinshasa government and fled in a hail of bullets across Lake Victoria, he had concluded that Kabila was not serious. Kabila left the fighting to Guevara and his Cubans.

It took a coalition including Rwanda and aggrieved Banyamulenge to get the job done, 31 years later. 

Can DRC be fixed?

The conflict in DRC is of enormous importance to Africa and to the world. Millions have died in recent decades. These deaths are largely unreported. It’s far from developed world media headquarters, and hard and dangerous to visit.

The potential of DRC for the region if it could ever be well run is overwhelming. The Congo river could provide electricity and water to much of the subcontinent. Its minerals are vital to modern technology.

There is the constant threat that its conflict could spill over into the neighbours. Recent reports suggest that Congolese troops have landed shells on the Rwandan side of the border, reportedly leading to some deaths.

Sadly, the country has never been governed well. King Leopold had the reputation of the worst colonial government on the continent.

Mobutu was a corrupt dictator who lined his pockets, built a palace at his ancestral home, and transferred so much US aid to his Swiss bank accounts and European properties that it amounted to a large chunk of his country’s GDP.

But I am dubious that risking SA soldiers is helpful. SA should have the capacity to provide professional expertise and resources to build Congolese institutions, but at present we struggle to find expertise for ourselves.

Will the SANDF be turned around?

To fight a battle like this, our troops need air support of various kinds, almost none of which is operational. We have enough jets, but almost none are in service because of a lack of maintenance and pilot air hours. A few Gripens were sent to the area, but the lack of in-flight refuelling capability is a hindrance.

We other kinds of air support. We lack usable cargo planes, designed to deliver equipment including helicopters and to deliver or pick up soldiers in need of evacuation.

The SA Air Force owns plenty of helicopters, but few pilots or machines have up-to-date air miles. Remember the 30 or so Italian Aeromacchis of the notorious arms deal? We never hear about them now, apparently because they have not proved suitable even if we had the capacity to maintain them and their pilots.

So it’s clear the SANDF needs a major overhaul. Decisions need to be taken about the expensive equipment lying in long-term storage, or just getting older. 

It hasn’t had a defence review since 2015. But would a defence review matter? Would it be listened to?  

Since Bangui, military weaknesses have become worse.

On July 24 2023, defence minister Thandi Modise admitted that the defence force was becoming more and more unsustainable, while at least one expert believes if we were attacked, South Africans would be defenceless.

So SA has been humiliated again.

After two phone calls between the two presidents this week,  Kagame posted a belligerent message on X in which he accused President Cyril Ramaphosa of lying and distortion and issued a veiled threat of military aggression.

Kagame said what had been communicated about his conversations with Ramaphosa in the media, by SA officials and by Ramaphosa himself, “contains a lot of distortion, deliberate attacks, and even lies”. 

Yet, until recently, the SANDF was fighting alongside Rwandan soldiers in Mozambique.

If this crisis arose in the middle of the last century, the US would have intervened. In 1960, when Washington thought that democratically elected Patrice Lumumba threatened western access to Congolese minerals, US and Belgian intelligence kidnapped and assassinated him.

In 1953, the US did the same in Iran, overthrowing the elected Mohammad Mosaddegh to keep Iranian oil in western hands, and installing the Shah in power until he was overthrown in 1979. The waning of that kind of influence is to be welcomed.

These actions were a stain on the West. 

This is a different time. US interventions in Africa focus on fighting Islamic terrorism. China does not intervene militarily, but its hand is almost everywhere where valuable resources are found. And Russia’s Wagner Group, now renamed the Africa Corps, has troops in a growing list of African states.

Foreign interventions rarely offer solutions. Only Africa can fix Africa, with stable effective government.

Facing this latest debacle Darren Olivier, a defence expert at the African Defence Review, said: “This is the end of SA as a regional power for the next decade at least.”

Olivier is right, but SA has never decided it wants to be that kind of regional power. Ideologically, the government feared being seen as the regional bully. Militarily, it neglected its armed forces while they decayed.

That has not changed with the GNU. It’s not clear that the GNU has the bandwidth to take on this problem, or even the problem of a collapsing military force.

If the GNU is to restore our role as the regional power, let alone our self-respect, we need to radically upgrade our potential for professionalism and expertise to be able to support our regional neighbours.

That may not mean entering DRC militarily at all, but SA needs a government that can manage its foreign policy well enough to know the difference.

Until then, Bachmann says, both sides finance their fight by taxing the miners. And if the Congolese side gets it, the profit goes to some offshore account in the UK or a real estate firm in Paris, not to the Congolese people.

If M23 takes control of it, the money goes to a Rwanda defence force-associated enterprise in Kigali and is partly reinvested in Rwanda, not DRC.

“From a moral point of view it means either some big fish in Kinshasa is looting the mine or some big guys in Rwanda are.”

•  Matisonn was a foreign correspondent in Washington DC for six years. He is author of ‘Cyril’s Choices, An Agenda for Reform’.