AS the big guns gather in Pretoria to probe alleged corruption in South Africa’s controversial arms acquisition deal, a small group of people on Thursday huddled in front of a run-down hospital in Johannesburg to protest military spending.

Asked how a small group could ever hope to influence the government’s policy, one demonstrator said: “even a small voice is better than no voice,” and others added that the protest “was a small start to a big movement”.

Sloganeering aside, the Coalition Against Military Spending said they had chosen to protest outside the somewhat tatty Coronation Hospital because it illustrated the $5.5-billion earmarked for arms could have been better spent, to name but two examples, on health care and houses.
The coalition’s representative, Rob Thomson proposed that the South African air force and navy be “mothballed” and that the defence force be disbanded.

“We don’t need a defence force and should rather move to civilian based defence, which involves people’s resistance to submission to authoritarian rule. We should be defending social spending, not our territory or our borders,” he said.

“South Africa’s security is not threatened by military enemies. The things that threaten us are Aids, poverty and global capitalism”.

Mark Malan, the head of the peace missions programme at SA’s Institute for Security Studies said while he understood the coalition’s outrage at the massive spending, “we live in a dangerous neighborhood”.

“I grant them (the coalition) that there are pressing socioeconomic problems - how do you relate submarines to the minimum levels of stability required in society for development?”

Malan said the “short answer” to whether South Africa needed all the arms it had ordered was “no - or at least not right now”.

“It’s rather the cost of not doing it (buying arms) - or whether we will need them in three of five years time - the answer then - conceivably yes.”

Malan said to do away with SA’s armed forced, while Lesotho, Swaziland, Angola and Mozambique kept theirs, would be to invite trouble.

He said at the time of the defence review, in 1998, the thinking seemed to have been informed by “post cold war euphoria,” but with hindsight, it now appeared as if the southern African region is far from peaceful.

“It would be inconceivable to disband our armed forces. We are looking to play a leadership role in conflict resolution and whether we like it or not, this does involve the deployment of troops. There is a close nexus between security and development - you cannot have development without a minimum level of security, which would ensure, for instance, freedom of movement.”

Malan said while the arms package had seemed affordable at the time, “nobody” had foreseen the rand’s plunge - as well as the increasing instability in the southern African region. “South Africa is not an island - our stability is linked to that of the region - if we sink the region sinks with us.”

With acknowledgment to Matthew Burbridge and the Daily Mail & Guardian.