Dictionaries define “strategy” as a detailed plan to achieve specific goals over a set time frame, mapping out concrete actions to anticipate and mitigate risks and pitfalls. SA’s national security strategy (NSS) falls short of this definition, amounting to little more than lists of problems identified and aspirations declared.
The imposition of the 30% US import tariff on SA goods illustrates its failures. The NSS accords the state “primary responsibility” for countering national security threats. Its “pillar four” talks of strengthening economic security, protecting economic sovereignty, and increasing the country’s competitiveness and “resistance to external and internal threats”, while pillar three on sovereignty outlines how foreign policy “creates favourable conditions for sustainable socioeconomic development” and strengthens SA by ensuring its “position is coherent and red lines are understood”.
The US tariff threat was well known, yet despite the publicised early-August deadline Pretoria delivered nothing that changed the playbook. It was apparent long before the May 21 White House meeting between US President Donald Trump and President Cyril Ramaphosa that politics was the root of the problem, specifically crime, BEE policies and SA’s international relations, which the US had already regarded as threats in Trump’s first term.
The grumblings that SA’s sovereignty is not up for sale underscore how confusing strategy with problem and aspiration lists obscures accountability for strategic failures. Following the tariff debacle, the government’s response was largely deflection: an exporters’ help desk, promised financial support and planned diversification of markets. But as business knows, securing new markets does not happen overnight and does not restore lost incomes or jobs.
SA’s so-called NSS claims to be inclusive or, in government lingo, “all-of-society” and “all-of-government”. Yet it failed at the first hurdle: the public consultations and parliamentary debates explicitly recommended by the 2018 high-level review panel report on the State Security Agency (SSA) and the expert panel investigating the July 2021 civil unrest. Instead, the NSS was drafted behind closed doors and released after delays only in redacted form.
Despite ministerial invocation of transparency and a new democratic intelligence mandate, the NSS offers no safeguards against politicisation, which the high-level review panel identified as a key SSA failing, alongside the “excessive secrecy” that allowed malfeasance and corruption. Saying something is transparent does not make it so. For a national security strategy to be genuinely inclusive, people must have direct input during public processes, even if politicians may not like what they’re being told.
The NSS identifies as national security threats charismatic churches, joblessness, poverty, inequality, illegal mining, lack of youth skilling, gender-based violence, cybercrime and the internet hosting “propaganda for a criminal lifestyle, consumption of narcotic drugs and psychotropic substances, and other illegal information ... for purposes of sowing public discontent towards the state and its institutions”. The list goes on. But when almost everything is regarded as a threat, nothing is a threat that can be addressed.
In contrast, other national security strategies are focused and integrated. Germany’s first national security strategy in June 2023, headed “Robust. Resilient. Sustainable”, situates itself within the EU and Nato, emphasising energy and resource security, cybersecurity, mitigating climate change and fighting poverty and hunger. The UK’s 2025 updated “Security for the British people in a dangerous world” links greater defence spending and border controls with pursuing partnerships that support the UK within the EU and Nato, alongside tariff-friendly US trade. Ghana’s 2020 national security strategy, “A secure and prosperous Ghana with regional, continental and global reach and influence”, sets out priorities under four crisply defined and articulated goals — national sovereignty; sustainable development; national cohesion; and co-operation — all backed by risk probability and impact assessment.
SA’s NSS does none of this. It also does not connect to other strategies like the national crime prevention strategy, the national policing strategy, energy and electricity plans, or the 2012 National Development Plan (NDP) to eliminate poverty and reduce inequality by 2030, which was unanimously adopted as a national blueprint.
While the NSS cites national interest, identity, will, values and national power as components, these remain ill-defined at best. Yet the required intelligence, law enforcement, legislative and regulatory architecture to deal with threats can only be purposefully designed and implemented when threats are accurately identified and characterised.
It is against this backdrop that the need to find scapegoats trumps all else. Segue to official commentary about a “right-wing nexus”, and the outraged finger-pointing at various opposition politicians for their US meetings. Alarm bells must ring when, as reported by Sowetan recently, DA MP Emma Powell was the subject of a report to the National Security Council, which, chaired by Ramaphosa, is integral to the national security set-up. Opposition politicking, as distasteful and ideologically contrarian as it may be, is constitutionally protected from security interference.
Yes, the far right has historically been a threat, from AWB leader Eugene Terre’Blanche to Janusz Walus, Boeremag leader Mike du Toit and others. But they were convicted of ideologically and politically motivated murder and assault, not opposition politicking. Conflating dissent with a security threat is dangerous. Unlawful surveillance like that of business person Saki Macozoma goes back to the Thabo Mbeki administration, while the unlawful 2008 surveillance of investigative journalism agency amaBhungane’s Sam Sole is on public record in court papers successfully challenging the Rica interception law. During the Jacob Zuma administration NGOs were deemed regime change agents. The legislative push to register NGOs, while ultimately unsuccessful, came in 2022 during the Ramaphosa presidency.
Also dangerous is the NSS’s centralisation of security within governance. After a passing acknowledgment that “we ought not to directly securitise” government work, it embeds security in service delivery, and in addressing instability alongside “any attempts to disrupt or divert government’s programmes”. This is a thin line that risks encroaching on legitimate protest and democratic contestation.
The NSS is a strategy in name only. It emerged from secrecy, violating explicit recommendations for public consultation, and has exposed the state’s paucity of strategic capacity. Until its performative transparency is corrected, SA will remain unprepared for real threats — economic, political and other — and risks national security being used as a shield to avoid accountability.
• Merten is a veteran political journalist specialising in parliament and governance.
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