Howard Barrell
Over a Barrel
On a visit to Nigeria in 1997, I was among 15 people who got off the British Airways flight from London at Kano, the West African country’s second city. The other passengers flew on to Lagos, or to Accra in Ghana.
As we walked into Kano’s arrivals hall, about 30 army officers engulfed us. “Passport! Passport, please!” they cried. Although disconcerted, I grew to welcome the attention.
I surrendered my passport to a captain and a lieutenant, who seemed to be operating as a pair. Ho-ho, thought I, with two commissioned officers personally handling my passport, I should not have to wait long for clearance.
I was disappointed. The two officers could not admit me to Nigeria. Instead, they were merely bearers of a kind. They took my passport – and a $10 note they gave me to understand they expected of me – to a second, more agitated maul forming around a wooden booth elsewhere in the arrivals hall. There, already jostling each other, were about 20 other officers, a few of them colonels, bearing other passengers’ passports.
Thus what might have been an orderly, fast- moving queue of 15 meek, jet-lagged passengers at an immigration control point became a cross between an ant hill, an argument and an auction.
I had more than two hours in the arrivals hall to arrive at an explanation for the phenomenon before I was allowed to move on to Kano customs – which is another story for another day.
In discussions with Nigerians over subsequent weeks, I confirmed my theory. It went like this: faced with huge unemployment, their government was using the defence force to create jobs; the military command could not find useful things for these surplus soldiers to do; the rate of pay in the army was poor; and the command compensated for this, one, by promoting favoured individuals through the ranks for no reason other than to put them on a better salary scale and, two, by allowing these instant officers to filch the odd dollar off foreign visitors in exchange for a useless service.
Here in South Africa, we would have to try hard and long to get ourselves into a similar mess. But Kano airport was a warning – albeit quite a benign one – against overstaffed, undertasked and poorly paid defence forces. They can quickly become demoralised and corrupt.
By its own admission, our defence force faces a serious overstaffing problem. It has 90 000-odd personnel, whereas it calculates that the country needs, and can support, only 70 000 full-timers. And now that the 1999 election is a thing of the past, we can surely expect the defence force to start to shed the 20 000-odd soldiers deemed surplus to requirements.
Our new defence force has already rid itself of thousands of personnel since 1994. Of former members of the old South African Defence Force and the homeland armies, more than 12 000 have accepted voluntary severance packages. Of the former guerrillas in Umkhonto weSizwe and other armed groups, more than 6 000 of the 24 000 who were offered integration into the new South African National Defence Force (SANDF)chose demobilisation or dropped out.
There are perhaps three central reasons for these force reductions. First, we are no longer a country at war with ourselves and our neighbours, and we face no immediate threat to our national sovereignty. Second, we have decided that spending on education, health and housing is more important than on defence. As a result we have made deep real cuts in defence spending. This spending, as a proportion of our total economic activity (measured as gross domestic product), has declined from 2,7% in 1994/1995 to 1,5%. And third, we have determined that what we need is a smallish, well-equipped and professional force as the core of our national defence – in preference to, say, a system of national military service or peace-time conscription.
In the eyes of many analysts, much more needs to be done to identify how exactly our forces are most likely to be deployed in future. Why? Because such a threat/task assessment will shape our forces, their training and equipment. For example, are we most likely to use them in peacekeeping abroad? Border control? Fighting crime? Whichever it is to be, the point of departure remains that we need a smaller, better-equipped and more professional force.
Currently, however, with the defence budget declining and personnel levels remaining well above the 70 000 needed, salaries make up a disproportionate part of the defence budget. Currently, we spend about 57% of the defence budget on salaries, with only 8% available for new equipment. The generally accepted ideal is that a defence force of the kind we envisage should spend 40% of its budget on personnel costs, 30% on other running costs and the remaining 30% on new equipment.
Unsurprisingly, a lot of the equipment now being used by the SANDF is decrepit. We may alleviate this shortcoming through the innovative arms deals we struck recently. But the jury is out on that.
Whether or not those deals achieve all they promise to in terms of inward investment, spending more than half the defence budget on salaries and neglecting equipment needs is unsustainable. It is also inconsistent with our defence vision. We have, consequently, chosen to reduce personnel.
But how to get rid of the 20 000 surplus soldiers? Here the choice is at least as difficult as it is in the civil service, which Idiscussed last week. Again, the defence force needs the government to stop faffing around and put in place a legal mechanism for “employer-initiated retrenchments”.
Many of us may balk at the prospect. Here are men and women who have been willing to place unlimited liability on their lives in defence of the country. Yet we can – and plan to – discard them, just like that!
Doing so need not, however, be that abrupt. The government has before it several options to help those likely to be retrenched prepare themselves adequately for civilian life.
A particularly helpful proposal has come from James Higgs, a lecturer at Britain’s Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. Higgs, who researched the SANDF’s personnel problems, has proposed that the government issue vouchers and allowances for education courses at civilian institutions to those facing retrenchment.
With or without this palliative, our politicians are likely to need more courage than is usually given them to bite the military bullet.