Parliament’s Joint Standing Committee on Defence reported on Friday its concerns about the maintenance of the South African National Defence Force’s (SANDF’s) prime mission equipment (PME). In a press release, the Committee noted that it had had a meeting on Thursday with Armscor, the Department of Defence agency responsible, among other duties, for acquiring materiel and services for the SANDF.

In particular, the committee was concerned that, currently, spares for SANDF PME tended to be acquired on a reactive, and not on a proactive, basis. It called for the development and implementation of “pragmatic solutions” to ensure that PME was “adequate for deployment”.

“While the committee acknowledges the funding shortfall within the SANDF that impacts directly on maintenance of equipment, the committee welcomes the intention by all role-players within the environment to hold a workshop that will streamline solutions to deal with the challenges of spares availability and general maintenance of PME,” stated committee co-chairperson Cyril Xaba. “The committee will in April meet to receive these solutions, which the committee hopes will give a clear way forward.”

During the Thursday meeting, the committee discovered, to its concern, that the specialists within the Armscor Defence Decision Support Institute were not analysing the maintenance requirements for “selected” PME in the SANDF inventory. The committee was of the opinion that using the expertise in this Institute would enable the implementation of a proactive systems management approach. This would ensure that PME was available.

Use of the Defence Decision Support Institute would also guarantee that Armscor played an essential strategic decision-support role for the SANDF (and the other government agencies that it supported). In turn, this would make certain that planning and implementation would be proactive. The committee and Armscor agreed that effective planning and proactive spares procurement should be emphasised.

A problem was the difficult financial situation of State-owned defence industrial group Denel, which was the original equipment manufacturer of a wide range of SANDF PME. This resulted in spares procurement requiring long lead times. The committee expressed the view that it was practical to use proactive spares acquisition, as a means to circumvent these funding problems.

“The continued challenges faced by Denel have a debilitating impact on the SANDF and ensuring that its platforms operate optimally,” highlighted Xaba. “Urgency is needed in resolving these challenges to enable Denel and by extension the SANDF to effectively deliver on its mandate.”

Nevertheless, the committee was optimistic that interactions between defence sector role-players would result in effective solutions. It would, however, “urgently schedule” a meeting at which these solutions would be examined, and at which the committee would ascertain how it could help in their implementation.