SA soldiers stranded - emergency meetings in Pretoria
Date: 16 May 2014
The following is a very rough translation from the Afrikaans article that was published in Beeld newspaper:
By Erika Gibson
On Friday morning, despondent South African soldiers of the United Nations (UN) Force Intervention Brigade in the Democratic Republic of Congo ( DRC ) spent a miserable night under their belts at Entebbe Airport in Uganda and Goma in the DRC - while their replacements sat high and dry in Bloemfontein.
The rotation of nearly 1,200 soldiers is part of the next term of the Intervention Brigade, but planning for their flights this week resulted in a fiasco.
Emergency meetings at ministerial level continued until late Thursday evening as the implications of the mess meant that there was no more food the soldiers in Bloemfontein.
They had to get take-aways because they had been planned to fly to Goma yesterday.
It seems the latest agreement is that a plane will begin to transport the soldiers to Entebbe transport on Saturday. Another two planes departed empty from South Africa to transport the same soldiers from Entebbe to Goma.
The air force does not have the transport capability to transport the soldiers themselves and therefore it is necessarily charters at huge expense.
One of the Air Force Hercules C-130's, which is on a support role to fulfill the rotation, is broken at Entebbe while parts are flown up from South Africa before it can be repaired.
This is the umpteenth time that there is a problem with flights.
In 2013, Joint Operations launched an investigation after no support aircraft were available to take reinforcements to the soldiers in the Central African Republic (CAR).
Soldiers that have been in Goma for the last a year were devastated about the delay .
In Pretoria emergency meeting after emergency meeting was held. It seems the hiring process started in April, but was only hastily finalized in the past week, when the original aircraft were no longer available.
According to sources, the problem is either due to ignorance of charter flights or to fraudulent motives to benefit certain contractors.
It seems that overflight clearances for the aircraft had even been requested this week. This process takes at least five working days.
