The Defence Intelligence (DI) of the South African army, by law, is not allowed to collect intelligence within the country, hence their limited role in assessing the dangers posed by last year's July unrest.
This was the response by SANDF chief, Gen Rudzani Maphwanya, as he explained the army's role during the July unrest and looting of shops that started in KwaZulu-Natal and spread to Gauteng. He was testifying on Tuesday before the investigative hearings by the SA Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) into the deadly riots which were triggered by the incarceration of former president Jacob Zuma. This saw the SANDF taking the streets through its Operation Prosper to help restore public order.
The police, State Security Agency and the SANDF have been facing tough questions over both the poor use of intelligence to assess the threat imposed by the unrest and responding promptly to it.
Maphwanya told the hearings that while the SANDF had a defence intelligence division, it was not allowed to collect intelligence internally in SA, making its role minimal in the assessment of the threat efforts aimed at combating the riots.
“The needs assessment was not done by us because of the DI not having the mandate to deploy and collect internally. The SANDF did not collect any intelligence prior, during and after the uprising. All what we were doing was informed by the requests that we made for us to support. We could not know what the intelligence picture was,” he said.
Maphwanya insisted that the SANDF also had no role to play in terms of public order policing when the police had not yet declared the situation to be out of their hands.
While some members of the SANDF had been accused of abusing civilians during raids, Maphwanya said he had not received any report of civilians injured by the military.
“Up to so far, both the incident reports as well as the after-mission review there hadn’t been any report of the SANDF injuring any civilians,” he said.
Evidence leader Yanela Ntloko asked Maphwanya about the code of conduct which the SANDF issued on July 14 for its members working in hotspot areas which included that soldiers must not run away from civilians and that they had an inherent right to self-defence.
Maphwanya said while soldiers had exercised their right to self-defence during the riots, they had not harmed civilians.
Amid accusations of abuse and shooting of warning shots with live ammunition by his troops, he said the SANDF was now working on ensuring that there was installed live recording for soldiers during their individual operations to help ensure that their activities could be accountable for.
“That project has been given to one of our entities to try and research on how best that can be done for us to get camcorders that our members can put,” he said.
He, however, pointed out that SANDF members would always use live ammunition and not rubber bullets as their job was not to scare people but to defend the country.
Maphwanya said while the SANDF had planned its Operation Prosper to last for a month, it had been asked to stay on for another three months by the SAPS, which remained unsure if it could manage to deal with the unrest on its own.
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