CAPE TOWN (Reuters) - South Africa's military is woefully underfunded, and a lack of personnel and new equipment may hamper its peace-keeping commitments in Africa, Minister of Defence said Lindiwe Sisulu on Tuesday.
Sisulu described military spending, at about 31 billion rand for 2010/11, as "shoestring" and insufficient for one of Africa's biggest contributors to peacekeeping forces, mainly in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The government is under enormous pressure to channel spending into health, education and policing, although the Treasury has said the defence budget will increase marginally to 36 billion rand by 2013.
"We have 1.3 percent of the GDP (gross domestic product) which is woefully inadequate," Sisulu told reporters before a budget speech in parliament.
"We do have a shoestring budget but we are not deploying a skeleton defence force. We have ageing equipment and our equipment is not very cheap," she said.
The defence force saved billions of dollars when it cancelled a $5.2 billion contract in November to buy eight Airbus A400M aircraft from the European plane maker.