Troops storm in – and bliksem

Politicians, whether they admit it or not, love the idea of having soldiers at their disposal. Few of them who order deployments of troops into non-combat zones in their own country have any experience wearing a uniform.

Example: Donald J Trump. The US president avoided the Vietnam war draft on a number of occasions, yet he still believes he is a latter-day Rambo.

Our politicians are no different. Cyril Ramaphosa, our president, may have played an important role in the liberation struggle, but he doesn’t know one end of a rifle from another.

Yet, that hasn’t stopped him from ordering the SA National Defence Force (SANDF) deployed on pressing crime issues, such as illegal mining in Gauteng and gang violence on the Cape Flats.

In his defence, you can understand why he has done it. He looks tough to the voters – and nothing says tough like a private wearing body armour, a face veil and toting an R-5 assault rifle.

The community has become desperate and tired of the president’s fiddling while the country burns, so this looks to them like a solution.

ALSO READ: Why SANDF deployment is stalling and could fail

Sadly, it won’t be – and many military and civil society experts have already warned about this.

Now, parliament has heard that the deployment of the SANDF has been dragging, as the military and the cops argue all sorts of things, from logistics to training.

SANDF chief of joint operations Siphiwe Lucky Sangweni told a joint standing committee military intelligence teams had already been deployed in preparation for a broader roll-out.

The SANDF’s involvement would focus on safeguarding civilians and ensuring the respect of human rights during operations, he said.

Here’s our problem with that: when SANDF troops were deployed to back up the cops during Covid, they quickly learned to bliksem anyone they felt like.

What’s to stop them going the same way now?

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