High time for navy to get into swim of things

OUR article ‘‘SA piracy task force may move to Durban’’, (February 27) refers. For the first time since the Union Defence Force was established in 1912, a senior SA politician has indicated that an SA government is, at long last, lifting its head out of the sand of our colonial past and beginning to appreciate the important part that the SA Navy plays in our foreign policy.

Hopefully, they also understand that Africa’s maritime defence is not the responsibility of either the UN or some other more powerful state, but rather our responsibility.

The SA Navy has for far too long been the Cinderella service in political and

Ymilitary circles. Therefore, we can but hope that Defence Minister Lindiwe Sisulu will also have the courage to correct the mistakes of the SADF generals and their bean counters, who in 1978 slashed the navy’s portion of the defence budget by more than half.

As far as they were concerned, it was only the army and the air force who were fighting the so-called ‘‘Border War’’.

Until that time, the navy usually received about 18 percent of the defence budget. By the early 1980s, this percentage had dropped to only 6 percent. As far as I know, the figure still hovers in single digits.

It is worth noting that things got so bad that, in the 1991 budget, the amount allocated to run the staff at Defence Headquarters exceeded the amount allocated to the navy.

I also like the return to Durban – a hard battle that I personally fought with the bean counters in 1989/90 and initially won, only to see the battle lost nearly a decade later.

Durban is after all the busiest harbour in Africa. Strategically it is, therefore, just plain silly for us to not have any proper naval presence there.

The call for the defence budget to be at least 2 percent of the GDP is also long overdue.

Whether we like it or not, we are the major power of the African sub- continent by some considerable margin. World norms for a regional power are in the order of an absolute minimum of 2.2 percent of GDP.

Minister Sisulu is quite correct in saying that the SANDF is badly underfunded. In fact, what she is asking is still 0.2 percent below the norm.

Parliament must understand that if they want the SANDF to participate in peacekeeping and anti-piracy, - poaching and -smuggling operations to assist our less fortunate neighbours, then this is the absolute minimum required.