South Africa and Its Disastrous Battle for the Congo
by Nils A. Haug • March 4, 2025 at 5:00 am
It turns out that while the South African soldiers were fighting for their lives in what might now be considered a "suicide mission", their military leaders were busy playing golf thousands of kilometers away.
Unfortunately, the ineptitude of South Africa's top military echelon and ministers of defense is only a symptom of abysmal political rule by the ANC, governing the country for the last 30 years. It seems that almost every decision they make is a catastrophe.
Added to this systemic incompetence is wide-spread corruption among politicians. It is so bad that many ANC ministers have periodically been accused, charged, or faced allegations of it.
White farmers are murdered at a rate four times the national average – one every five days. In 2019, for instance, more than 1,000 individual farmers were attacked. Some political parties allege that farm killings "can justifiably be viewed as genocide" and have accused the police of suppressing official figures that indicate a "drastic increase" in farm assaults and murders.
In criticizing Trump publicly, it is not exactly clear which planet Ramaphosa and the ANC believe they live on. Adopting that attitude, as the world witnessed last week during the US president's meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, might be self-destructive and highly detrimental to the people of South Africa.
South Africa's defiant attitude escalated further when the ANC indicated an intention to increase its nuclear power capacity and permit Iran and Russia to tender for the project – in blatant violation of US law.
"Nearly 3,000 people have been killed in Goma in recent days" reported Vivian van de Perre, Deputy Head of the UN mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), in central Africa. Goma is the capital and largest city of the DRC's North Kivu Province.
In the final week of January, 17 South African National Defence Force (SANDF) soldiers in the Congo were killed, and many more wounded, in battle with the rebel group M23 (which is backed by Rwanda), when the M23 captured Goma from DRC government's forces. It is believed that "M23 seeks to set up an administration to govern Goma as it has in other areas under its control in the eastern DRC."
