Former two-star general Bantu Holomisa, now a parliamentarian representing the United Democratic Movement (UDM), told the Transkei Defence Force Military Veterans Association (TDFMVA), a “them and us” issue still remained high on the agenda of old – and serving – soldiers.
Speaking to former personnel of one of the then South Africa’s TBVC (Transkei, Bophuthatswana, Venda and Ciskei) states in the early 1970s, he said defence force personnel of the “homelands”, also known as Bantustans, experienced difficulties – and still do – in the SA National Defence Force (SANDF).
Integration has always been fraught with difficulties, with an ‘us vs them’ mentality, with TBVC forces’ members feeling as if they are third class citizens, he is reported as saying by politicsWeb which elaborated on what Holomisa said as regards “recent contentious draft regulations seeking to regulate military veterans’ pensions”.
The new regulations bring to the fore: members of the former non-statutory forces (NSF), ex-MK (Umkhonto we Sizwe) and by extension ex-Apla (Azanian Peoples’ Liberation Army), are a superior breed of military veterans in the greater community of veterans and are elevated through legislative processes to assume a special dispensation of pension above members from other formations. This is sugar-coated under the guise of military veterans, instead of supposedly ‘liberation struggle veterans (LSV)’, he said.
Any notions propagated and advanced in the name of military veterans in the South African setting should, by legislative framework, include all members of military formations irrespective of previous political background. These proposed regulations are wrongly premised in terms of legal framework and should be dismissed with the contempt they deserve, Holomisa continued.
“It glaringly is the ‘us vs them’ mentality with the statutory forces completely left out which is against the spirit of integration, the Military Veterans Act and is completely unconstitutional,” he is reported as saying.
In dealing with these pensions, we must recognise those in the ANC military wing are not speaking the same language. Some want R4 million each and have held ministers of state hostage. Some people claimed their children were killed by superiors in military camps in exile, he said.
“All is therefore not well in their internal debate,” Holomisa said, offering a solution by way of suspending the amendment, ironing out the problems from within and sticking to the Veterans Act that talks about one SANDF.
He further suggests testing the constitutionality of the regulations seeing them as a violation of the agreement reached during CODESA (Convention for a Democratic South Africa) negotiations.
