The South African specialist in military strategy, Abel Esterhuyse, told Lusa today that the objectives to be achieved by the troops of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) in the Cabo Delgado region in Mozambique should be clarified.
“I think it is important to differentiate between three critical aspects: the military capacity of SADC to carry out operations, the nature of the insurgency we are facing in Cabo Delgado and what these forces should be doing on the ground,” Esterhuyse said in an interview with Lusa.
“In my opinion, there is a critical unclear question at the moment as to what precisely SADC forces should be doing in Cabo Delgado,” he added.
The South African analyst, who is in charge of the Strategic Studies department of the Faculty of Military Science at Stellenbosch University in the Cape, also questioned whether the expectation of the SADC military operation in the neighbouring country is to do “counter-insurgency”, dealing with local instability and insurgency or “whether they are there on the ground to provide support to the Mozambican Armed Forces in terms of training”.
“So far we have seen that they have been relatively efficient in mobilising part of the forces because the large contingent of the South African Armed Forces is so far not in the area, it is still an embryonic group of forces, it is only a contingent of special forces because they have not yet deployed the main forces,” he emphasised.
In the opinion of the South African military strategy specialist, so far there has been “relative effectiveness” in fighting “some” of the problems in the north of the country, “as well as the Rwandan forces”, stressing that the main issue is related to “the nature of the insurgency” in Cabo Delgado.
“I am not totally convinced that we are facing a traditional insurgency movement,” Abel Esterhuyse noted.
“If we analyze it, I think that what we are facing in Cabo Delgado is a criminal insurgency of the kind of opportunistic entities that move around carrying out opportunistic actions with the aim of extorting money,” he said.
However, the South African military analyst said, “at the root of the problem” we have “a complex emergency where the lack of governance is glaring, that is, there is a space that is not being governed and that has suddenly become the focus of development with countless expectations from various interested groups, with a lot of organized crime in that area”.
All of this combined with “a terror campaign that nobody really knows what it is, and that intimidates the populations, and then the involvement in this whole equation of security forces, opposing political forces, and private military companies that further confuse the whole picture of insurgency,” he explained.
“I think that one of the main problems that the security forces are facing at the moment in Cabo Delgado is the lack of intelligence,” said the academic and specialist in military strategy.
“Until they can put in place the solid foundations of an intelligence system that can provide cover for counter-insurgency forces as to what is actually happening in that area, the forces will be able to attack targets of opportunity, but they will not be able to deal with the problem comprehensively,” he anticipated.
Since July, an offensive by government troops with the support of Rwanda, later joined by SADC, allowed security to be increased, recovering several areas of Cabo Delgado where there were rebels, notably the town of Mocímboa da Praia, which had been occupied since August 2020.
