PRINCIPLES AND STRATEGIC THEMES FOR A SOUTH AFRICAN NATIONAL SECURITY STRATEGY

Abstract

The purpose of the research was to provide the groundwork for the development of a South African National Security Strategy (NSS), and to promote the alignment a future South African NSS with the internationally-applied understanding of what constitute a NSS. The study examined some of the key current principles and strategic themes, distilled from current National Security Strategies and Policies (depending on country specific use and availability of published text) of prominent developed countries and selected developing countries. A qualitative research methodology with a comparative and descriptive study approach was used. From a principle point of view, the study finds that South Africa requires a NSS to provide coherent drive to make human security a reality. It is recommended that the South African national security vision be articulated, clearly premised on identified national values and/ or prioritised interests. The NSS must be published widely. The NSS mission should be to build quality and resilient security capacity, not quantity – considering socio-economic objectives. Security effort resilience and opportunity exploitation is critical to national security advancement. The NSS should strive to deny opportunities relating to greed; prevent grievance fuelling conditions; promote inclusivity and eliminate exclusivity. Innovative, flexible and adaptable, high resilience processes which are based on the ethos of human security must be employed. Immobility, slow decision-making, response and resilience due to excessive bureaucracy and the inability to adapt to change as a result of architecture and process inflexibility will reduce the capacity of security efforts to respond, mitigate and manage the future South African security challenges – and/or exploit opportunities that arises. Processes must be kept simple to accelerate flow of matèriel and intelligence/information. Organisational structures should be kept as flat as possible to accelerate decisionmaking to respond and recover. Coordination and communication mechanisms that allow for ease of joint collaboration and consensus based decision-making needs investment. Finally, from a strategic theme perspective, a NSS should aim at knowledge creation; should facilitate action based on intelligence; enhancing capacity adaptiveness and flexibility; partnership-based preemption and response - based on a pre-determined level of sustainment and quality resilience and should strive to create national security effects.