Mercurial DRC President Félix Tshisekedi expelled a year-long East African Community peacekeeping mission from his country in 2023 for failing to fight M23 rebels. It was thus clear that Kinshasa expected Sadc peace enforcers to pacify militant groups.

SA’s failure to read these dynamics correctly was particularly shocking, given the country’s huge 25-year investment in the region. This has included deploying UN peacekeepers to the DRC since 1999 and leading a UN-funded intervention force that defeated M23 rebels in 2013. Under Thabo Mbeki, Pretoria had negotiated the first durable peace deal for the Congo in 2002, while deploying AU and UN peacekeepers to Burundi in 2003-06.

Pretoria’s second failure was the disconnect between its political strategy and military capacity. Rwanda’s autocratic warlord-president, Paul Kagame, has clearly targeted SA troops as a way of forcing the withdrawal of the Sadc force, as warlords in Somalia and Liberia had earlier similarly targeted US- and Nigerian-led missions. If SA wished to pacify the DRC (which the UN has failed to do in 25 years), it would have needed military resources far beyond its means to wage a war against both Rwanda and its proxies.

Despite defence minister Angie Motshekga’s denials, her deputy, Bantu Holomisa, was more on the mark in noting that SA’s ill-equipped contingent in the DRC was running out of ammunition. Amid pressure to prioritise butter over guns in the post-apartheid era, defence budgets have now been slashed to R55bn, with 65% going towards paying salaries for the 71,000-strong force. Combat readiness has inevitably suffered and few of SA’s helicopters, fighter jets, frigates and submarines are operational. An astonishing 85% of the air force’s fleet is inoperable.

Pretoria’s third failure was not learning lessons from previous military deployments in the Central African Republic in 2013 — when rebels killed 13 of its soldiers who similarly lacked a clear mandate — and more recently in northern Mozambique, where SA struggled to subdue jihadists due to logistical deficiencies. Deploying to the DRC after Mozambique was akin to moving from the frying pan into the fire.

Some analysts have cited economic interests in mineral-rich DRC to explain SA’s puzzling deployment. Whatever the motives, this mission is resulting in a humiliating withdrawal that could have enormous repercussions for Pretoria’s long-held ambition to occupy a permanent seat on an expanded UN Security Council.