South Africa is duty-bound to help redevelop Angola, argues Peter Vale, but this is easier said than done
THE truly historic changes in our country notwithstanding, the South African National Defence Force will come to learn that making war is much easier than making peace. Angola, the SANDF’s old nemesis, is teaching this in tough and unforgiving ways.
This is why the looming decision to send South African support troops into Angola needs to be understood for what it is. Consider this chain of questions:
Whose interests are being served? Those who will initially benefit are the members of South Africa’s defence establishment. They are fighting, as the whole country knows, an epic battle over their budgets.
No longer protected by the shield of apartheid, the defence and arms industry is scrambling for state resources along with education, health and the provision of water. These are real world issues: they touch the lives of millions of South Africans — especially women and children — for whom gleaming weapons and the latest technologies are nothing against the struggles of daily life.
To meet the immediate challenge to their very being, therefore, the SANDF will see the possibility of engagement in Angola — on the side of the United Nations, nogal — as a God-given opportunity to strengthen its hand in the tussle for national resources.
Many will interpret this claim as an inadequate portrayal (some, even as a callous betrayal) of a professional defence force which is in the throes of a difficult political adjustment and which, many believe, helped to deliver South Africa’s democracy.
For this there need be no apology. South Africa’s military forces have had an easy run during this transition: no one has raised the penetrating question of why we need an immense and very costly war machine while we cannot provide the basic securities of life for all our people.
This raises the point about the country’s and the region’s security agenda: who is setting it?
The answer, of course, is the SANDF. Where it has not directly fashioned the arguments, it has been backed by a private ”civil society”; a veritable plethora of institutes, consultants and self-styled experts have talked themselves and the country into believing that a central priority was to maintain a powerful defence force.
Really creative alternatives to this option have scarcely been considered. So, for instance, where the new South Africa needed a ministry for disarmament — like other countries — it inherited, instead, a portfolio for defence.
Only an imbecile would suggest that the Angolans should be left to their fate. For more than 20 years the country has been subjected to a terrible destruction. If reports are to be believed, scarcely a shard of concrete has escaped shelling; its citizens have been mutilated and maimed; its civil institutions damaged beyond repair; and Luanda, one of Africa’s most beautiful cities, has been almost entirely corroded.
For these and other reasons, it deserves help: South Africa has a duty — precisely because it was so central to all this destruction — to assist with all this.
But will the entire region benefit? The answer is no.
As the world also knows, South Africa’s is the economy best poised to develop the countries of southern Africa. Its strategic location and its industrial base position is — to use an overworked cliche — as the locomotive of regional development.
Once peace comes to Angola — and we must pray that it does — South African business, not the region’s, will rush to rebuild that country. They will carry out their plans to turn Luanda’s beachfront into a string of casinos and their schemes to build golf courses in Africa’s richest agricultural soil: this will be hailed as progress. It means that South African firms, which made profit from decades of war in Angola, will be rewarded by bringing it development through reconstruction.
In the hurry to rush troops from the very country which caused Angola its initial horror, why hasn’t anybody suggested the folowing four alternative options?
Firstly, to honour our UN obligations, as we must, let us put at the disposal of our neighbour Namibia, whose army is compatible with our own, the medical and engineering support we have been asked to contribute. Secondly, offer Angola’s people the one resource which really guaranteed South Africa’s democracy: the experience of the country’s many, many negotiating forums.
Thirdly, together with our Southern African Development Conference partners, let us initiate a regionwide scheme to help rebuild Angola. This would draw the region together in a specific focused economic project and spread the payoffs from Angola’s development beyond the narrow economic base presently concentrated in the PWV.
And finally — in parallel with the Truth Commission — let us immediately probe the entire clandestine war in Angola, not only this new phase. Let Acting Judge Edwin Cameron help flush out which ministers, which officials, which firms, which individuals were involved in supporting Unita’s now rudderless Jonas Savimbi.
We should do this because the mercenaries who now fight under the banner of Executive Outcomes are not the first South Africans to have messed — and messed up — Angola’s chances for a new beginning.
Peter Vale is professor of Southern African Studies at the University of the Western Cape