South Africa needs a far more inclusive conversation about the future of its defence industry and the sovereign capabilities required to protect the country’s national interests.
For too long, the debate around Denel has centred on turnaround plans, recapitalisation proposals and promises of recovery. Important as these issues may be, they risk obscuring a more fundamental question: what defence-industrial capabilities does South Africa genuinely need to preserve its strategic autonomy, and what is the most effective way of sustaining them?
The deterioration of Denel over more than a decade is one of the most tragic but visible symptoms of a much broader problem confronting both the South African National Defence Force and the country’s defence-industrial base. State capture, governance failures, financial instability, the loss of critical skills and declining customer confidence have weakened not only Denel itself but confidence in South Africa’s ability to sustain strategic sovereign capabilities.
Despite repeated recovery initiatives, many of the underlying causes of Denel’s decline remain unresolved.
The latest concerns surrounding Pretoria Metal Pressings (PMP) illustrate the challenge. In early 2025, an approved turnaround plan was intended to stabilise the division, restore operational performance and secure its long-term sustainability. Yet concerns have since emerged that key elements of the plan were delayed, inadequately implemented or failed to deliver the intended outcomes.
The result is continued uncertainty over the future of one of South Africa’s most important ammunition and munitions manufacturers.
This matters because PMP is not merely another business unit within Denel. It forms part of a strategic defence value chain that supports both domestic defence requirements and export opportunities. Failure to restore its operational stability has implications for the broader defence, safety and security industrial ecosystem that depends on reliable local manufacturing capacity.
More importantly, the PMP experience exposes a recurring pattern.
Turnaround plans
South Africa has not suffered from a shortage of turnaround plans. Over the past decade there have been numerous restructuring programmes, recapitalisation initiatives, recovery strategies and governance interventions. The problem has not been planning. The problem has been leadership, reform, implementation, accountability and consequence management.
Parliament and the National Treasury have repeatedly been asked to support recovery initiatives. Employees have endured years of uncertainty. Suppliers and industry partners were expected to remain patient while new plans were introduced. Meanwhile, the South African National Defence Force had to depend on a shrinking industrial base to preserve its critical sovereign capabilities. The promised outcomes have too often failed to materialize, while strategic industrial capacity has steadily eroded.
This should concern all South Africans because defence industries cannot be rebuilt quickly once they are lost. Highly specialised engineering skills, manufacturing expertise, intellectual property, institutional knowledge, testing facilities and export relationships take decades to develop. Once they disappear, restoring them becomes extraordinarily difficult and expensive.
The debate must therefore move beyond the question of whether Denel should simply be preserved in its current form.
The more important question is which sovereign capabilities South Africa genuinely requires and how those capabilities can best be provided and sustained.
For many years, policymakers have tended to assume that preserving Denel and preserving sovereign defence capability are synonymous objectives. They are not.
South Africa possesses a sophisticated defence-industrial base that extends well beyond Denel. Numerous private-sector companies continue to design, develop, manufacture, maintain and support advanced defence and military technologies and systems. Despite our declining defence budgets and a difficult domestic environment, many remain internationally competitive and continue to generate export revenue.
A credible national defence-industrial strategy should therefore identify which capabilities are genuinely strategic, which require direct state ownership or control, and which can be sustained more effectively through partnerships, joint ventures and broader industry participation.
The objective should never be to preserve institutions for their own sake. The objective should be to preserve strategic sovereign capabilities.
National security
South Africa’s national security depends on retaining critical skills, technologies and industrial capacities that support military readiness, export competitiveness and strategic autonomy. Whether those capabilities reside within Denel, the private sector or a combination of both should be determined by practical and pragmatic considerations rather than ideology.
Against this backdrop, Deputy Minister of Defence and Military Veterans Bantu Holomisa’s call for an independent review of Denel’s turnaround strategy and long-term sustainability is both timely and necessary.
Serious questions remain regarding the effectiveness of current recovery efforts, the sustainability of Denel’s business model and the broader future of South Africa’s sovereign defence-industrial capabilities.
An independent review should not merely examine Denel’s finances. It should address several critical questions:
- Why have previous turnaround initiatives failed?
- Why have approved interventions, including the PMP turnaround plan, not delivered the expected outcomes?
- Which defence-industrial capabilities are genuinely strategic to South Africa’s sovereignty and national security?
- Which capabilities require state ownership, and which can be sustained through broader industry participation and partnerships?
- How can Denel be integrated into a stronger and more collaborative national defence-industrial ecosystem?
- What governance reforms are required to ensure accountability and implementation discipline, including possible rationalization between functions of Armscor and Denel?
- What funding and investment models are realistically sustainable under current fiscal constraints?
Most importantly, the review must not become another report that is acknowledged and then ignored while industrial capability continues to decline.
South Africa’s defence industry remains one of the country’s most advanced technology sectors. It supports high-value manufacturing, research and development, exports, strategic skills and military readiness.
The sector’s economic contribution is often overlooked. Conservative estimates suggest that the broader South African defence industry contributes between R25 billion and R40 billion annually in direct economic activity, supports between 55,000 and 80,000 jobs and generates exports of between R4 billion and R8 billion a year.
National strategy
With the right policy environment, improved governance and a coherent national strategy, export earnings could increase significantly while supporting advanced manufacturing, technological innovation and skilled employment.
Imagine the contribution to national security, economic growth, exports and job creation if South Africa’s defence industry were properly reformed, adequately supported and allowed to realise its full potential.
The central policy question is therefore not whether Denel should survive in its current form.
The real question is whether South Africa can preserve and strengthen the sovereign capabilities that remain strategically important, while addressing the governance failures, implementation weaknesses and accountability deficits that have repeatedly undermined recovery efforts.
The PMP turnaround plan should have demonstrated that lessons had been learned from past failures. Instead, it has reinforced concerns that implementation remains the greatest challenge confronting Denel and, by extension, South Africa’s broader defence-industrial strategy.
Deputy Minister Holomisa’s call for an independent review may therefore prove to be one of the most important interventions in recent years.
If conducted objectively and followed by decisive action, it could provide the foundation for a modern, sustainable and globally competitive defence industry that preserves essential sovereign capabilities while leveraging the strengths of both Denel and the private sector.
If not, South Africa risks continuing a familiar cycle of recovery plans, missed targets, declining industrial capacity and the gradual erosion of the capabilities upon which national security ultimately depends.
The choice is no longer between bailout and collapse.
It is between meaningful defence-industrial reform and continued strategic decline.
Preserving technologies
The real debate is not whether South Africa can afford its defence industry. The question is whether South Africa can afford to lose one of its few remaining advanced manufacturing sectors — a sector capable of securing national security, generating high-value exports, sustaining tens of thousands of skilled jobs and preserving technologies that contribute directly to national sovereignty.
A properly governed, strategically focused and internationally competitive defence industry could become not only a pillar of South Africa’s national security, but also a significant contributor to economic growth, industrial development and job creation.
[Image: By Danie van der Merwe – originally posted to Flickr as Rooivalk Attack Helicopter, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5946296]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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