The admission by Defence Minister Mosiuoa Lekota this week that the number of jobs created as a result of the multibillion-rand arms deal of 1999 was much lower than hoped is no surprise.

Like many promises around the arms deal, job creation was also an exaggeration. Like the hideously expensive Swedish fighter-bombers we have bought and, now, cannot find the pilots to fly, or the submarines we keep on the surface for the lack of expertise underwater.

Lekota says only 13000 jobs have been created as a result of the offset deals attached to the weapons we bought. Under this programme, much trumpeted at the time by the president and his cabinet colleagues, the companies selling SA arms were supposed to make major investments in SA to create jobs.

They have not and government is powerless to make them. Alec Erwin promised about 60000 jobs would be created in offset projects. With the weapons nearly paid for, 13000 jobs is a disgrace and even that figure may be an overstatement. How, for example, do we view the agreement whereby Saab, builder of the Viggen jets we have bought, buys into (and thereby rescues) a struggling division of Denel as an offset? Are the jobs in that division part of Lekota’s 13000?

They shouldn’t be. We were promised new jobs and it was mostly rubbish.

The arms deal is the Achilles heel of the Mbeki administration. It has torn the African National Congress leadership apart and put a former deputy president on trial. The president himself faces unforgiving pressure to make clear his personal role in the tenders finally awarded. There is no knowing, now, whether he would survive close scrutiny of that role.

As far as the economic effect of the deal is concerned, it has been not so much a disaster as a forlorn hope. More than R30bn has been paid out to manufacturers for weapons systems. Even if Lekota’s 13000 jobs figure is accurate, that means each job has cost R2,3m to create! So let us no longer lie about economic benefits. There simply aren’t any worth speaking of.

The arms companies, meanwhile, maintain expensive public- relations operations in SA to convince us otherwise.

And, hearing Lekota suggest that now that the first big arms deal is almost paid for, we might consider new purchases, the skin crawls at the prospect of having to entertain these parasitical arms pedlars any longer in our midst. They are an affront to honest business.

With acknowledgements to Business Day.