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South African Strategic Defence Procurement Package |
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 A decision by South Africa ’s first democratically elected government to purchase US$ 4.6 billion worth of weapons has been the single largest, and one of the most controversial, public procurement deals in post-Apartheid South Africa.
In the 1995 Defence White Paper, the Ministry of Defence highlighted the need for restructuring and reviewing the status of the new South African National Defence Force. The Defence Review highlighted the need to re-equip the SANDF to meet the traditional national-security needs of the new democracy. This process resulted in the proposal of a multi-billion Rand Strategic Arms Procurement Package, widely referred to as the “Arms Deal”. The bill for the Package will be picked up by the South African Treasury, indirectly through taxes, over the next few years.
Expenditure of this nature ignited a national debate on Defence spending. Government claims that the Package will pay for itself in the long run through counter-trade agreements of investment in South Africa with contracted companies, known as the Offsets programme. This case study will document this debate with specific reference to the rationale of and delivery on the Offsets programme. Controversy associated with the Arms Deal spread as allegations of irregularities in the tendering process and the lack of transparency in subsequent investigations came to light through the media. This national outcry has, as of yet, not resulted in the cancellation of any Arms Deal contracts and this seems an increasingly unlikely as much of the hardware has already been delivered.
This study includes articles highlighting the issues around corruption in the Arms Deal: the details of the allegations of corruption including both the bribe-takers and the bribe-payers; and documentation linked to the response of the Chapter 9 Institutions, Parliament, and various civil society organisations and media sources to the controversy surrounding subsequent investigations into corruption in the tendering process. Various legal documents of criminal prosecutions as well as civil actions by the ECAAR-SA and the businessman Richard Young linked to the legality of the “Arms Deal” are also cited.
The following reports/documents are included: the Joint Investigation Report into alleged of irregularities in the Strategic Defence Procurement Package – drafted by the Auditor-General, the National Prosecuting Authority and the Public Prosecutor, as well as the Auditor-General’s “Joint Investigation Report into the SDPP” and his response to allegations of irregularities in the initial Joint Investigating Report; the “Fourteenth Report of the Standing Committee on Public Accounts (SCOPA)” and SCOPA’s response to the Auditor-General’s Special Report. For the sake of a broad comprehension of the entire ‘Arms Deal Scandal’, a number of case studies from civil society sources have been included.
There are also various media articles pertaining to the involvement of the following firms - African Defence Systems (ADS), BAe Systems, European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company (EADS) and Thales / Thompson.
(Photo- AP / Heribert Proepper: The submarine 'S101' is launched at the Howaldtswerke-Deutsche Werft (HDW) shipyard in Kiel, northern Germany, on Tuesday, 15 June 2004. This submarine of the 209-class was officially handed over during a short naming ceremony to the Navy of South Africa.)
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