Minister of Defence and Military Veterans Angie Motshekga. Picture: Gallo Images/Brenton Geach According to the Bible, God created heaven and earth in six days. Defence Minister Angie Motshekga was given an entire week to produce a plausible rationale for Iran’s participation in a naval exercise in South African waters, in defiance of the military’s Commander-in-Chief, President Cyril Ramaphosa.
She laboured mightily and, so far, has produced diddly-squat. A week after the exercise ended the Iranian ships were still, provocatively, offshore. To be fair to Motshekga, compared to God, she may have the harder brief.
How, without heads rolling at the top of government, does one offer a credible account of Iran’s continued presence once it belatedly dawned on Ramaphosa how grotesque the optics of Iranian warships cheek-to-jowl with the SAS Amatola, while Tehran crushed dissent at home and Washington debated whether South Africa still deserved the tariff privileges of the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act? Her board of inquiry — no information is available as to its composition — has a relatively simple task. It must determine whether Ramaphosa’s instructions on Iran’s participation in the Will for Peace 2026 (WFP), supposedly “clearly communicated to all parties concerned”, were nevertheless “misrepresented and/or ignored”.
Read Full Article on The Citizen
[paywall]
That, of course, does not mean the department of defence won’t still conjure up a fantastical explanation that protects the president’s reputation, lets the defence minister and the military high command off the hook, and avoids blaming the Iranians. The problem is that no one who matters will believe any finding that does not, in one way or the other, reconcile the contesting scenarios: a president who procrastinates; a South African National Defence Force (Sandf) leadership emboldened by his weaknesses to usurp for itself a political role; and an Iran that can rely on Pretoria’s backing, irrespective of the costs to SA.
[/paywall]
