The Star newspaper has hit back at Defence Minister Mosiuoa Lekota’s ”scathing attack” on a report on missing equipment and supplies worth millions in Burundi.
”Get your facts right, Mr Lekota,” was the newspaper’s headline in response to Lekota’s remarks at a press conference in Pretoria on Wednesday.
The newspaper reported on Tuesday that millions of rands’ worth of vehicles, guns, ammunition and bombs, and supplies worth over R27-million had vanished from the South African army base in Burundi over the last four years.
The report also said at least 50 missing South African National Defence Force (SANDF) mortar bombs were found in a FNL Phalipe-Hutu rebel group camp in Kiriri, Burundi.
”The disturbing thing about this report is that it is so grossly inaccurate as to suggest bad faith,” Lekota told journalists in Pretoria.
All vehicles had been accounted for but some rifles and mortar bombs were missing, he told journalists.
”We can account for each and every one of them, where they are operating,” Lekota said about the vehicles, adding that none were missing.
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.
The Star challenged Lekota’s statement that every vehicle had been accounted for. It said the Auditor General Shauket Fakie had found stocktaking had not been done at all army units during the year.
The newspaper said submissions on Fakie’s report to Parliament’s standing committee on public accounts (Scopa) had not been made, despite Lekota’s claim that this had been done.
The Star reported Scopa chairperson Themba Godi as saying the committee had decided to call the ”serial offender” department before it in view of their ”poor, unsatisfactory and continuous failure to adhere to the Public Finance Management Act and Treasury regulations”.
The department had received its fifth qualified audit in a row this year, the paper said.
Questions were sent to the department on October 26 but the paper was told a week was needed to research and respond.
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 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