Defence Minister Mosiuoa Lekota reacted with outrage on Wednesday to reports that the defence force had lost millions of rands worth of equipment and vehicles during peacekeeping operations in Burundi.
”The disturbing thing about this report is that it is so grossly inaccurate as to suggest bad faith,” he told journalists in Pretoria.
The minister described reports by Independent Newspapers that vehicles such as Casspirs, armoured personnel carriers, Land Rovers and several cars were missing from the South African base in Burundi as ”grossly inaccurate”.
”We can account for each and every one of them, where they are operating,” Lekota said about the vehicles, adding that none were missing.
Independent Newspapers reported on Tuesday that R27-million worth of vehicles, guns and ammunition had vanished from the base.
He said the implication of the reports was that the equipment and vehicles lost had fallen into the hands of rebels.
”With this kind of activity the Burundi government would have kicked us out a long time ago,” Lekota said.
Lekota, lecturing journalists on the ethics of their profession, said he detested such reports, describing them as ”extremely irresponsible”.
”I cannot think of anyone who has money enough, even in the black market of a country like Burundi, [to] be able to buy equipment like the vehicles that are suggested here,” he said.
”I don’t know where anyone would keep quantities of equipment [as] suggested here [in the report] in Burundi,” he said.
Lekota did, however, admit that some rifles and mortar bombs were missing.
”Some of which in ambushes, others of the things were stolen and others of the things were lost. Of course it is normal that things can get lost and so on,” he said.
He said in one instance 22 000 rounds of ammunition were stolen from a South African National Defence Force (SANDF) base in Burundi.
In a more recent incident, 35 rifles were taken by Janjaweed rebels in an ambush of SANDF peacekeepers in Sudan’s Darfur region and some rifles were also lost when a vehicle ”fell” into the river in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. — Sapa