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Hurricane Idai, which devastated southern Africa, could be a blessing in disguise for the South African army, the most reliable peacekeeper in the region, who could face a crisis due to budgetary problems.
The question is the subject of a main article in Tuesday Mail and guardAfter taking a week at the South African Air Force to bring together the resources needed to launch a rescue operation in Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe, country in which cyclone Idai had killed 700 people and left hundreds of thousands homeless.
Decline of capabilities
According to Mail and Guardian, Pretoria managed to get six helicopters across the border, saving 14,000 people from the trees and roofs where they sought shelter from mbadive floods.
Sipho Kings, senior correspondent of the Johannesburg-based newspaper Mail and guard and author of an incisive article on the critical state of decline of South African defense forces, says that despite its commendable action to deal with one of the worst natural disasters in southern Africa SANDF has never been in such a financial crisis.
Defense expenditure of less than 1% of the national budget
according to Mail and guard The South African National Defense Force spends 57 million euros for its peacekeepers in the Democratic Republic of Congo despite operational cost coverage by the UN.
Sipho Kings told RFI that the government's 2016 decision to reduce the army's resources by 10 billion rand over three years meant that South Africa was now spending less than 1% of its budget on defense.
During this exercise, he says, the department received 50 billion rand to manage everything, including the purchase of new equipment, maintenance and stopping the decline of critical defense capabilities.
This is in addition to the continuation of peace support operations and the safeguarding of the territorial integrity of South Africa.
Budget Priorities
Kings says that a plan developed in 2015 to double each year the defense budget remained in the drawers.
"While the portfolio committee in Parliament is in favor of an increase in defense spending, it is simply informed, when it goes to the treasury, that there is no money." money, "he said. "People would like to change it but it will not change."
King adds that South African decision makers are under increasing pressure to put money into competing interests, such as education and health care.
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