Thank you, hon
Michalakis, it would be improper of me to be judgemental. I would rather say that there are challenges with the national fiscus. I think we are not the only government department which has this kind of challenge.
Having those challenges, we then have to look and prioritise what it is that is possible to do and what we may not be able to do. Equally, I think you are correct to say that in the past 25 years
... if I may remind hon members, when we ushered in our democracy, there had to be hard choices to make and one of the hard choices was to reduce the budget of the SA National Defence Force, SANDF, which may have been very bloated because there was a need at the time to address the immediate socioeconomic challenges of the majority of South Africans. However, this has continued to a point where we are not welcoming it anymore. We are very unhappy about it. I would imagine that it was a correct decision to take in the beginning but with time, people need to understand that we have a country to defend; we have a mandate given to us by the Constitution of the Republic ... by the way, the mandate of the Defence Force is in the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa. Therefore, if there are issues which inhibit us from implementing that mandate, we may actually as a country run into serious difficulties.
Lastly, the fact that we already have porous borders that I have referred to earlier on, which you can't even deploy some of the essential technologies on the borderline or even boots on the ground; you can't increase them, points to the fact that at some point we have to pause and reflect in spite of the constrained
national fiscus and see what it is that we want to prioritise as a country - whether we do want to continue to have the SANDF or not, where are the priorities of the country? What I do know standing here and think many of us know is that you can never attract your investors and you can never grow your economy not unless there is peace and stability in the country. A peaceful and stable country brings about prosperity in any country.
So, I think I want to end there, Chair, thank you.