Letters

The Democratic Alliance (DA) shares many of the concerns voiced in the editorial, French Connections (May 4).

While the DA fully supports a meaningful peacekeeping role for SA on the continent, we believe that this needs to be measured against domestic priorities and must not jeopardise the pressing developmental needs of South Africans. The South African Air Force is in urgent need of modernisation but government’s decision to purchase highly sophisticated military transport aircraft worth billions of rands will not address its operating difficulties and will, in many instances, place a further burden on an already under- resourced air force.

The Airbus deal is flawed on a number of accounts.

The deal was largely carried out in secret, without a tender process and without proper consultation with Parliament. There are also very real operational concerns about the deal.

The head of the airforce, Lieut Gen Carlo Gagiano, recently stated that there is currently a critical shortage of 11977 personnel in airspace control, crew, engineers and technicians.

There is a very real possibility that there will not be enough trained pilots to operate these aircraft and insufficient runways capable of handling of them.

It also deeply worrying that government is trumpeting the value of defence offsets related to the Airbus deal for state-owned Denel.

It is high time government realised the offset logic is discredited. There are still, for example, R5,9bn of investment offsets outstanding from the first arms deal.

Any time government commits to spending billion rands of taxpayers’ money, it should be subject to scrutiny. Unless we do so, there is every chance that taxpayers will be left to carry the financial burdens of a government that does not learn from its past mistakes.

Rafeek Shah MPDemocratic Alliance Spokesperson on defence

With acknowledgements to Rafeek Shah and the Business Day.