Over a month since Will for Peace ended, followed by two Board of Inquiry (BoI) announcements into allegations around the multinational naval exercise, a “legal technicality” is putting the proverbial spanner in the works.
When Defence and Military Veterans Minister Angie Motshekga made public the BoI a day after the exercise wrapped up, South Africans were informed it would “look into the circumstances surrounding the allegations and establish whether the instruction of the President [Cyril Ramaphosa] may have been misrepresented and/or ignored as issued to all. The BoI must establish all the facts on what took place during the exercise and table to the Minister in seven days a report after the completion of the exercise”.
The Presidential “instruction” apparently was with regard to Iran’s participation in the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) led exercise which also saw Russian Federation Navy and SA Navy (SAN) platforms in Simon’s Town as active participants. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) had observer status as apparently did Ethiopia.
Subsequently, a second statement – this one signed off by Department of Defence (DoD) Head of Communication (HoC), Siphiwe Dlamini, also given as the contact person in the first BoI statement attributed to the Ministry of Defence and Military Veterans (MoDMV) – was issued on 28 January. It named the BoI members as judges Bernard Ngoepe (chair), Kathy Satchwell and Mashangu Leeuw as well as retired SA Navy (SAN) JG admiral Patrick Duze.
That statement made no mention of the BoI mandate or terms of reference, whether it can lawfully depose witnesses, timeframe and where it will be located.
A DefenceWeb inquiry this week was responded to in a single sentence reading: “The BoI as envisaged has not commenced its work due to a legal technicality which is presently being looked at”.
The “legal technicality” could refer to what SA National Defence Union (Sandu) National Secretary Pikkie Greeff identified as “concerns regarding the procedural legality” of the BoI. This is in the light of DoD and/or SA National Defence Force (SANDF) BoIs generally made up of serving military personnel, as suggested in the Defence Act.
Speaking ahead of Armed Forces Day in Thohoyandou last week, Defence and Military Veterans Minister Angie Motshekga said the Will for Peace BoI was still finalising its regulations. The Minister added that she would soon announce how long the BoI would take to complete its work.
