'Critic's arms deal crusade fuelled by rage'

Published Nov 21, 2016

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YOUR front-page main headline and article (November 18) makes for interesting reading.

However, may I suggest that with Mr Crawford-Browne, we need to go back to where 
his fruitless crusade really began.

In the late 1990s, the government undertook what was recognised by both the British and the US representatives in this country to be the most open and public investigation into military requirements ever undertaken by any country in the world.

Any citizen who wished to participate was invited to the debate, which took some months.

Although the main centre of debate was in the old Assembly Room in Parliament, Cape Town, sittings were also held in other cities to allow as broad a cross-section of the population as possible to contribute.

There were indeed a large number of participants coming from across the full spectrum of public opinion.

So, included in the participants, admittedly as a minute minority, were a few organisations who believed most sincerely that South Africa 
did not need any military forces at all.

Mr Crawford-Browne was probably the most outspoken of this tiny minority, and took great personal umbrage when the vast majority of those who participated would not support his beliefs.

So it was that the final conclusion included, apart from a multitude of other recommendations, the desperate need for the ships and aircraft that eventually made up the so-called "arms deal".

Naturally, this was an abomination to Crawford-Browne and his tiny group.

I would like to suggest that far from being really concerned about the claimed corruption in the deal, he was in fact lobbying for the ultimate disbanding of the South African National Defence Force.

Thus, I believe that understanding what his real aim was, all the SANDF people who gave evidence at the Seriti Commission stressed the reasons why the arms were required.

Naturally, of course, this once again angered Crawford-Browne.

My suggestion regarding his aim is supported by his own words from your article in that he asks “for the court to instruct Minister of Finance Pravin Gordhan to recover the estimated R70 billion” of the arms deal.

How he expects the minister to do this, I really do not know, unless of course he still believes in some "Fairy Godmother."

Anyway, if he was being honest in his "anti-corruption" crusade, he would rather be asking that the people who he has identified as taking "kickbacks" be forced to pay that money back to Treasury.

I also suggest that his legal attempts to achieve his aim have probably cost the state more than whatever corruption there might have been in the deal, and I would very much like to see him forced to declare who has been giving him financial support and by how much.

After all, when he lost his case against Trevor Manuel and was ordered to pay the costs, he pleaded that he was unable to do so because he was bankrupt.

Yet, he still found money to pay lawyers to open further frivolous cases.

He still pleads poverty, yet claims to have “engaged a highly reputed firm of foreign lawyers” to continue the battle for him – please don’t ask me to believe that they will be acting pro bono on his behalf.

I am sorry. Sincerely. I do not think that South Africans are that gullible. To merely engage such a firm, assuming it is as highly reputed as he claims, requires really big money, so who is providing that funding?

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