Skills left and were not replaced: Tau urges hard reset to defence industry
South African Trade Minister Parks Tau has called for a major overhaul of the country's struggling defence industry. He highlighted the severe decline in procurement, research funding, and skilled labor over the past three decades.
Why it matters
The decline of the domestic defence sector poses a strategic risk to national security and industrial capability in an increasingly volatile global geopolitical environment.
Trade minister Parks Tau says South Africa must confront the long decline of its defence industry after three decades of shrinking procurement, collapsing research funding, the loss of tens of thousands of jobs and an exodus of skills that will not be easy to replace.
Tau told a defence industry conference in Pretoria on Monday that the government must be honest about the downward trajectory of the past three decades, in which defence force acquisition from the domestic industry fell to R850m in 2017 from R26.2bn in 1989/90.
Over the same period, research & development funding slumped to about R500m from R6.1bn, while employment across the value chain plunged from about 130,000 people across 3,000 companies in 1990 to about 13,000 people across 600 firms now.
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