Letter from Terry Crawford-Browne

Yes, Shauket Fakie, Mac Maharaj and Norman Arendse are all highly honourable men (Play it again, Shauket May 29).

So were Tony Yengeni and Chippy Shaik. Andrew Feinstein, Gavin Woods and Pregs Govender are a further three casualties caught up in the dirtiness of the arms deal.

The arms deal was a government-to-government scam contrived to accommodate arms-trade lobbyists in Britain, Sweden and Germany.

The Germans would get the navy contracts, and the British and Swedes the aircraft contracts.

The SA Navy has ended up committed to warships it cannot use, and the SA Air Force has warplanes it does not want.

Vast resources, time and energy have been squandered on the arms deal that more properly should have gone towards eradicating SA's poverty crisis.

Our government was gullible in swallowing the nonsense that expenditure of R30bn on armaments would translate into foreign investments and exports worth R110bn and create 64165 jobs.

Complicit European governments who came in droves after 1994, expressing admiration for the new SA, while also trafficking the arms deal are the real cause of this fiasco.

The way forward?

A court order ruling that the arms deal is unconstitutional.

The financial consequences of cancellation will then fall to European governments who can explain to their taxpayers why they are so heavily engaged in peddling weapons to countries such as SA that, plainly, have other priorities.

 Terry Crawford-Browne
Economists Allied For Arms Reduction, Cape Town

With acknowledgement to Terry Crawford-Browne and the Business Day.