There are now panicked attempts to downplay what happened.
Last week, the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) ignored the orders of its commander-in-chief, President Cyril Ramaphosa, over the participation of Iranian warships in a naval exercise off the Cape.
There are now panicked attempts to downplay what happened. If Ramaphosa fails to act decisively to snuff out this ongoing SANDF insubordination, South Africa’s political complexion will eventually change fundamentally, perhaps irreversibly.
In time, as has happened in so many parts of the continent, we risk drifting into some form of military government.
Last week’s naval exercise out of False Bay shows that the slow tilt over the past year or so towards a politically assertive SANDF is continuing apace.
Will for Peace 2026 (WFP) is a rebrand of the controversial Mosi III exercise that was scheduled for last year, but was “indefinitely postponed” because of the bad optics of SA joining Iran, Russia and China in manoeuvres, while simultaneously hosting the leading Western nations at the G20 summit in Joburg.
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So, what could possibly go wrong with a rerun of Mosi III, now under the alias of Will for Peace 2026? Only this: the Iranian regime slaughtering unarmed citizens and President Donald Trump threatening retaliation, all while South Africa’s preferential access under the African Growth and Opportunity Act sits in the balance.
Again, Ramaphosa has moved only at the 11th hour. He reportedly decided after the exercises were already underway that Iran’s participation was too provocative and instructed the SANDF to tell Tehran to withdraw its three warships.
Last week, a senior official told Daily Maverick that all the participating defence departments – including Iran’s – had agreed that Iran would not take part in the key sea phase starting last Tuesday. That is not what happened.
On Tuesday, the Iranian corvette Naghdi sailed in the sea phase, according to a SANDF Facebook post. As the furore erupted, the SANDF deleted the post, cancelled media briefings and refused to say whether the Iranian vessels were participating, observing, or had withdrawn.
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The obvious question is where responsibility for defying the president lies. As African Defence Review director Darren Olivier put it on X: “It’s increasingly looking like, despite senior officials confirming that Ramaphosa ordered Iran to be excluded, the government as a whole is now avoiding the execution of that order, with no apparent response from the president.”
DA defence spokesperson Chris Hattingh said in a statement that South Africans were entitled to “clear answers” but, instead, “what we have seen is confusion, contradiction and secrecy”. None of this is happening in a vacuum.
The SANDF is regularly and audaciously straying into the civilian arena of governance. In August last year, during an official visit to Tehran, the chief of the SANDF, General Rudzani Maphwanya, unilaterally pledged political and military solidarity with Iran against American and Israeli “hegemony”.
A few months later, the chief of the navy, Vice-Admiral Monde Lobese, used public speeches to accuse “criminals” and “unpatriotic sellouts” in government and parliament of colluding to starve the SANDF of funding needed to defend South Africa against “Western threats” to its sovereignty. In neither case was any substantive action taken against the meddlesome military.
Whether the week-long WFP debacle is muscle-flexing, malfunction or mischief, Ramaphosa cannot avoid it by skulking incommunicado in the Presidency. Or perhaps he can. It’s a strategy that he’s been allowed to get away with for seven years.
On Friday, the ANC kicked for touch. Defence and Military Veterans Minister Angie Motshekga appointed a board of inquiry to report in a week on “whether the instruction of the president may have been misrepresented and/or ignored”.
Risibly, it adds: “It can be further stated that all government entities in this event have been working very closely, in consultation with each other, at every step.”
ALSO READ: Presidency confirms Ramaphosa’s instruction to Motshekhga that Iran exit naval drills
