Sent: Monday, March 24, 2025 6:52 AM
To: Adekeye Adebajo <adebajo@yahoo.com>
Subject: SA in the Congo: Journey Without Maps
ADEKEYE ADEBAJO: SA's chaotic journey in DRC comes to an uneasy end
It was a dangerous peace-enforcement operation and not a traditional peacekeeping mission
The announcement that the 15-month 1,300-strong SA-led Southern African Development Community (Sadc) force — also involving Tanzania and Malawi — would be withdrawing from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) after the deaths of 14 South African soldiers, represents a calamitous blow to SA's credibility as a regional power.
This mission has been a chaotic journey without maps, conducted without much strategic vision as to the means of achieving the quixotic mandate of restoring the DRC's territorial sovereignty, working with the country's ragtag, ill-disciplined army to neutralise armed militants in an eastern region with more than 100 armed groups waging a 30-year conflict.
Despite the false claims by several senior SA officials, this was clearly a dangerous peace-enforcement operation and not a traditional peacekeeping mission mandated to separate belligerents that had previously agreed to a peace deal. Three failures were evident in this debacle.
First, Pretoria failed properly to assess the dynamics of the protracted Great Lakes conflict in which Rwanda recently sent 3,000-4,000 troops and sophisticated military equipment into eastern DRC in support of the efforts of its M23 proxy.
Despite Kigali's claims of wanting to vanquish genocidal DRC-based Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda militants that Rwanda accuses of being allied to the Congolese army, the UN has fingered Kigali for looting the DRC's natural resources (which the EU ignored in signing a controversial minerals deal with Rwanda in 2024).
Mercurial DRC President Félix Tshisekedi expelled a year-long East African Community peacekeeping mission from his country in 2023 for failing to fight M23 rebels. It was thus clear that Kinshasa expected Sadc peace enforcers to pacify militant groups.
SA's failure to read these dynamics correctly was particularly shocking, given the country's huge 25-year investment in the region. This has included deploying UN peacekeepers to the DRC since 1999 and leading a UN-funded intervention force that defeated M23 rebels in 2013. Under Thabo Mbeki, Pretoria had negotiated the first durable peace deal for the Congo in 2002, while deploying AU and UN peacekeepers to Burundi in 2003-06.
Pretoria's second failure was the disconnect between its political strategy and military capacity. Rwanda's autocratic warlord-president, Paul Kagame, has clearly targeted SA troops as a way of forcing the withdrawal of the Sadc force, as warlords in Somalia and Liberia had earlier similarly targeted US- and Nigerian-led missions. If SA wished to pacify the DRC (which the UN has failed to do in 25 years), it would have needed military resources far beyond its means to wage a war against both Rwanda and its proxies.
Despite defence minister Angie Motshekga's denials, her deputy, Bantu Holomisa, was more on the mark in noting that SA's ill-equipped contingent in the DRC was running out of ammunition. Amid pressure to prioritise butter over guns in the post-apartheid era, defence budgets have now been slashed to R55bn, with 65% going towards paying salaries for the 71,000-strong force. Combat readiness has inevitably suffered and few of SA's helicopters, fighter jets, frigates and submarines are operational. An astonishing 85% of the air force's fleet is inoperable.
Pretoria's third failure was not learning lessons from previous military deployments in the Central African Republic in 2013 — when rebels killed 13 of its soldiers who similarly lacked a clear mandate — and more recently in northern Mozambique, where SA struggled to subdue jihadists due to logistical deficiencies. Deploying to the DRC after Mozambique was akin to moving from the frying pan into the fire.
Some analysts have cited economic interests in mineral-rich DRC to explain SA's puzzling deployment. Whatever the motives, this mission is resulting in a humiliating withdrawal that could have enormous repercussions for Pretoria's long-held ambition to occupy a permanent seat on an expanded UN Security Council.
• Adebajo is a senior research fellow at the University of Pretoria's Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship.
| Professor Adekeye Adebajo | |||
| Senior Research Fellow, Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship (CAS), University of Pretoria (UP), South Africa.
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