Daily Maverick The SANDF is preparing field hospitals and mobile mortuaries as every available member has been put on standby to enforce the lockdown and bolster health services. Leaders have defended the military’s professionalism, but complaints of abuse are likely to rise.
President Cyril Ramaphosa has taken the unprecedented step of authorising the deployment of all available SANDF personnel during the State of Disaster as Covid-19 continues to spread and the government scrambles to bolster health services and enforce lockdown regulations.
An additional 73,180 SANDF members, including the regular force, reserve force and auxiliary force can now be deployed until at least 26 June 2020.
This comes after the president authorised the deployment of 2,820 members to assist the SAPS and other state departments in March.
“The entire SANDF has been put on standby,” Defence Minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula told Parliament’s Joint Standing Committee on Defence on Wednesday.
That includes all members of the army, air force, navy and military health services, except those already deployed to places like the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Mozambique Channel.
The SANDF has also been approached by volunteers, such as doctors and engineers, which will be deployed as an auxiliary force.
“If you look at the numbers and the rate at which the infection that’s gone up, you realise at some point we may need the kind of human resource deployed that has never been seen before,” Mapisa-Nqakula told radio station 702 on Wednesday.
She said the country must prepare for the worst as some countries are recording tens of thousands of deaths.
“If it doesn’t happen in South Africa, thank god. If it happens, we must not be caught with our pants down, we must not be caught napping.”
Defence analyst Helmoed Römer Heitman said the unexpected move was likely a contingency plan to ensure more SANDF members could be deployed when necessary without Ramaphosa having to repeatedly make adjustments to his order.
While the SANDF can now deploy a total of 76,000 members, Chief of SANDF Joint Operations Lieutenant General Rudzani Maphwanya did not detail how many would be operational at a given time.
“We will be required to respond to the situation as it arises,” he said.
Defence Force members have been assisting the SAPS at roadblocks, on foot patrols, in cordon and search operations and have been patrolling the country’s borders.
“The SANDF highly contributed to the enforcement of measures to curb the spread of the virus,” said Mapisa-Nqakula.
The role of the Defence Force will now increase along with the response to the virus. Noting the SANDF’s versatility in responding to a disaster, Römer Heitman described members as “warm bodies and muscle”.
“It is a bunch of organised, disciplined people with a command and control structure and communications.”
It is preparing isolation and quarantine wards at military hospitals in Pretoria, Bloemfontein and Cape Town and will establish field hospitals across the country. It is also sourcing additional mobile mortuary units, the need for which Mapisa-Nqakula noted multiple times.
The additional deployment has a budget of R4.59-billion and the Defence Force will procure medical equipment to treat patients at sites run by the military health services.
Maphwanya said Ramaphosa had instructed SANDF leaders to think about how the additional equipment and facilities could be used to improve the health system in the long term.
