Fifteen months is a long time in politics. It is long enough for a civilian to die after gaining access to unexploded ordnance at an unfenced military training area. It is long enough for court orders to remain only partially implemented because alternative accommodation was never provided. It is long enough for hundreds of millions of rand in proposed perimeter fencing to remain unfunded aspirations. And it is long enough for an interdepartmental working group that Parliament instructed the Executive to establish to remain nothing more than a phrase repeated in a PowerPoint presentation.
On 28 May 2025 the Portfolio Committee on Defence and Military Veterans resolved that the Ministers of the relevant departments must establish an interdepartmental working group to address the encroachment of informal settlements and other forms of occupation onto SANDF facilities. The Department of Defence itself had told the Committee that the problem was significant and that the SANDF could not resolve it alone. The instruction was clear. The first actual engagement with that working group only took place on 12 August 2026. What we received was a non-presentation.
The Department claimed “significant progress.” The reality is that the working group has not been formally constituted. There is no founding instrument. There are no approved terms of reference. There have been no formal meetings. There is no dedicated budget. There are no measurable deliverables. Verification of the full extent of occupation is still described as “continuing.” The Encroachment Management Framework remains incomplete. Court orders at Marievale and elsewhere remain stalled. The long-delayed fencing project at 6 SAI, approved in 2019, is still contingent on “the availability of funds.” Lives have already been lost because of that delay.
This is not bureaucratic inertia. It is institutional contempt for Parliament. When a Portfolio Committee gives an instruction and fifteen months later the Executive returns with the same problem and almost no institutional architecture to address it, the issue is no longer technical. It is political. Those responsible for the undue delay must be disciplined. Accountability is not optional.
The security dimensions of the crisis are real and serious. Damaged or stolen perimeter fencing, illegal electricity and water connections, theft of military equipment and cables, and the presence of unexploded ordnance in areas accessible to civilians create genuine risks to operational readiness and public safety. Ammunition depots and live-fire training areas require priority protection. Section 83A of the Defence Act exists precisely to regulate access to military property. It has not been aggressively utilised. These failures must be corrected.
Yet the deeper failure is conceptual. The Department and the interdepartmental actors continue to treat the problem as a series of discrete security and property-management incidents that can be solved by more fencing, more litigation and more coordination meetings. This approach is doomed to fail. The structural driver is the unresolved land hunger of the majority of South Africans. Large tracts of state land, including military land that is under-utilised or poorly secured, exist while millions of people remain landless or live in inadequate housing. As long as that fundamental injustice remains unaddressed, pressure on military facilities will continue. Informal settlements will form, expand and press against any available land. Enforcement under the PIE Act will remain contested, expensive and incomplete because the courts correctly insist on just and equitable processes and, where appropriate, alternative accommodation.
The Economic Freedom Fighters have said this consistently. Temporary security measures may buy limited breathing space at particular bases. They will not end the cycle of occupation, partial eviction and re-occupation. Land must be made available to those whom the SANDF seeks to remove from Defence property. Eviction without alternative land simply moves the problem. The only coherent national response is a thorough programme of land expropriation without compensation, linked to a spatial and housing strategy that prioritises the landless and the working class. Until that occurs, every “solution” at the level of individual bases remains reactive, underfunded and vulnerable to re-occupation.
I am therefore deeply disappointed by the quality of the engagement on 12 August 2026. The Department cannot come to Parliament claiming a serious national-security and public-safety problem and then demonstrate almost no institutional capacity to address it. Coordination without enforceable decisions, budgets and timelines is not progress. It is process designed to create the appearance of activity while avoiding hard choices.
I am equally disappointed by the approach of the Chairperson of the Portfolio Committee, the Honourable Dakota Legoete. Once again the Chair has allowed his membership of the ANC to influence his judgement, and adopted a soft posture that effectively protects the Department of Defence and the Minister rather than holding them to account. The Committee’s job is not to provide political cover for Executive failure. Its job is to demand answers, set deadlines, insist on documentary evidence, and ensure that those who ignore parliamentary instructions face consequences. When a working group instructed fifteen months earlier has still not been formally established, the appropriate response is not gentle encouragement. It is censure. When civilian deaths have occurred because a fencing project approved years earlier remains unexecuted, the appropriate response is not to note the problem and move on. It is to demand immediate, funded implementation and individual accountability.
The critical oversight questions remain: Which organ of state is responsible for each response? Under what legal authority? With what resources and timeframe? Who is accountable for non-performance? Those questions remain unanswered in any meaningful way. The Committee should have insisted on the immediate tabling of the formal founding documents of the working group, the production of an authoritative national register of every affected facility, facility-specific implementation plans with named officials and hard deadlines, and the resolution of the alternative-accommodation bottleneck that is rendering court orders ineffective. Instead, the engagement risked becoming another exercise in managed process.
The defence of military facilities is a legitimate and necessary state function. It cannot be separated from the national land question. The persistence of this crisis is a direct consequence of the failure to implement thoroughgoing land redistribution. Piecemeal fencing and selective litigation will at best produce temporary results while shifting the settlement problem elsewhere.
Treating military land as an ordinary informal-settlement problem without regard to security risks is equally unacceptable. The correct approach is security-led but constitutionally compliant, and it must be linked to the broader struggle for land justice through expropriation without compensation.
Those who have wasted fifteen precious months, during which civilians have lost their lives, must face consequences. The Portfolio Committee must stop protecting the Executive and start doing its job. The people of South Africa deserve both secure military facilities and the land that was stolen from them. Until both are delivered, the vicious cycle will continue.
Carl Niehaus MP
EFF’s permanent representative on the Portfolio Committee on Defence and Military Veterans, and the Joint Standing Committee on Defence.