SA’s national security strategy is both funny and frightening

So, the Cabinet has approved a 47-page national security strategy that essentially warns of potholes ahead.

You’ve got to love government reports. Forty-seven pages to give us the kinds of insightful goals like “combat violent and syndicated crime” and “create conditions for peaceful socio-economic development of South Africa and to ensure its military security”.

You just know some management consultant had an absolute field day laughing as they drafted that while charging seven years’ worth of steak and wine.

The strategy gets great at Pillar 5: Cyber security, which concludes with the ingenious goal of “address cyber-security challenges”.

At least the person writing this nonsense is getting paid but who even reads this stuff? More importantly, why bother if the stuff, basic as it may be, never gets implemented and is more outdated than a Nokia 3310?

Here’s another insight from the report: “Economic hardship or low economic growth which were further exacerbated by the impact of Covid-19 pandemic and the implications of the war in Ukraine.”

Gosh. A whole state and we cannot plan around a pandemic of five years ago and a war that started in 2014 and geared up in 2022? That sounds like the ultimate doctor’s note: “Please excuse Timmy from doing his homework. He ate a dodgy Christmas pudding in the 2023 holidays.”

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Pandemics and wars from years ago should not be excuses not to get the job done. Just like we can’t keep taking wins from the success of the 2010 World Cup, we can’t throw our hands up and be like, oh let’s maybe have some social collapse because we can’t deliver to our people since there’s this war on a different continent.

We’re still trading with both countries. It’s not like any industry has been decimated by that war.

But fear not, because our leadership has a plan. It involves creating a culture of preparedness. It comes in two layers but the first has to be a favourite.

“The first principle of our culture of preparedness is a shared acknowledgement that creating a prepared nation will be an enduring challenge.”

Sure, it reads like a statement preparing for failure before starting, but it should be praised for encouraging a long game strategy. Plus, it gives us more to work with than “develop key scientific and technological competences”. Seriously, this report is a wonderful “wtf do you mean?” kind of read.

The report’s hilarity aside, we have to engage with the idea of reports for their own sake. Ideally, whatever information one can elicit from this report that wasn’t immediately obvious to anybody with functional capacity should be valuable.

If it is valuable, then it should too, be implementable. If it is implementable then this report should be more than the minutes of the previous meeting when it comes to issuing the next report.

It’s not enough to simply set out goals, some having no real discernable meaning nor quantifiable outcome, and then say “great, job done”. Because then you are putting up the pothole warning with no intention of ever fixing the potholes.

That’s just not good enough and it certainly isn’t why we pay for a bloated government.

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It’s unacceptable to issue a report which hints of social collapse but offers a vague list of priorities; the same priorities that have been listed in reports since the ’90s and as generic as ever. It covers everything from corruption, to substance abuse and even the “mushrooming of charismatic churches”.

We don’t need reports to know what the problems are. We have several of those. We need strategies to address them and the right people to implement them. Curiously, in this report the only mention of capable human resources relates to foreign missions.

Let’s take a step back and before issuing a new report, let’s start with what we’ve done to address the problems in the previous reports.

Maybe then we’ll prevent such gems as “strengthen civil peace and harmony”. Until it actually has some discernable and actionable meaning, it is just a waste of ink.