02:51 GMT 8th November 2011
Addressing MPs on August 16, Makwetla, himself a veteran of the African National Congress's military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), said the new legislation was designed to uplift the lives of tens of thousands of destitute ex-combatants who had fought in the apartheid-era conflicts since 1960.
'Conscious of the importance of the change they fought for, and the sacrifice involved, many military veterans from the liberation armies have with humility resigned to living wretched lives to give freedom a chance,' he said, before adding this was an issue that was always going to 'come back and haunt us'.
The bill, which provides for pensions, healthcare, education and transport, as well as housing, job placement, business opportunities and counselling, has been cautiously welcomed by most of the war veterans' representative bodies around the country.
Ex-combatants say the fallout from sacrificing their formative years to fight the apartheid system has left them marginalised from society, with little chance of participating in a meaningful way.
They strongly believe that unless meaningful interventions are instigated soon by the government, many of the country's former freedom fighters will end their lives as they began under the apartheid regime -impoverished and on the margins of South African society.
MK veteran Trevor Ngengemane told Ne1vsAfrica that he joined the ANC's military wing as a teenager in 1986 and was regularly involved in armed conflicts with apartheid era security forces. During one of these engagements in 1987 Ngengemane was shot in the leg, and as the years have passed his wounds have reduced his ability to find even menial work on a regular basis, the only employment avenue open to him due to his lack of skills training.
Today he lives in a small one-roomed wooden shack at the back of his parents' house in Nyanga township, a large urban settlement on the outskirts of Cape Town in South Africa's Western Cape province. The interior of his home is lined with pages from glossy magazines, which were pasted all around the walls in an effort to keep the wind and cold at bay during the Western Cape's chilly and wet winter months.
'After [South Africa's first democratic elections in] 1994 I went into the new army but the integration process was very slow so I took demobilisation and returned to civilian life. When I came home I found reintegrating into my community very difficult.
'I could not find work because I had no training or skills that would help me find a regular job -- all I knew how to do was to be a soldier. I have done a little part time work since then, but there has not been much.
'I feel like the government has abandoned me. Even though I was shot and cannot do manual work because my leg has not healed properly, I don't get a special pension or even a social grant,' he said.
Ngengemane went on to say that he suffers psychologically because of the experiences as a combat soldier, and this coupled with his inability to get work caused his relationship with the mother of his four children to break down irreparably.
'It is 17 years since we got democracy and the government still has not acted to help us. I have children but no home for them to live in. The government says they are trying to rebuild this country but they are supposed to look after us as well.
'There were many military formations fighting against apartheid, not only MK, whose members remain disciplined. Some of the soldiers from these groups say they are not all willing to wait for help for ever. Their anger is a threat to South Africa's democracy, I feel,' he warned.
Despite question marks over how the initiative will be rolled out at the interdepartmental level, and concerns over costs and who should qualify for the benefits, President Jacob Zuma's cabinet has approved R1.6bn ($203m) over the next three years to fund the initiative.
Simply put, South Africans who prove they are ex-combatants from the apartheid era conflicts can submit themselves to a means test designed to ascertain which of the benefits they qualify to receive. Healthcare has been scheduled as the first benefit the department will provide to veterans because the South African military has the facilities to facilitate its provision. Its rollout began a few months ago.
Burying veterans who die destitute is another service the state will provide, and this will proceed as soon as the bill becomes law. But transport and other benefits will take far longer to implement due to the lack of appropriate systems at interdepartmental level.
While there has been political disagreement about how much money the taxpayer can afford to fork out to satis factorily address veterans' needs, the importance of reintegrating ex-combatants into post-conflict societies has been recognised as essential.
The need to support demobilised soldiers' social reintegration was an issue that was raised at a national level as early as 1993, by the former chief of the apartheid-era South African Defence Force, General Meiring at a local defence policy conference.
'There are a large number of individuals who have received military training of some sort and who will not be accommodated in the South African army. To leave these individuals jobless in the streets is to invite trouble,' he reportedly said.
In 1999 the ANC led government of the day attempted to address these needs through the introduction of the Military Veterans Affairs Act, but even the ruling party has admitted their efforts to provide restitution to date have failed.
'The reason we are piloting new legislation through parliament is because our previous interventions all failed. They were inadequate, piece-meal and not holistically conceived. As a result the support for military veterans remained adhoc, discretionary and uneven,' Makwetla told National Assembly members in August.'
The fallout of the failure to reintegrate ex-combatants coupled with the negative effect that combat experience has had on many individuals, has been vividly captured in research work done for The Atlantic Philantropies in 2006.
The international foundation dedicated to improving the lives of disadvantaged and vulnerable people estimated that some 80,000 ex-combatants needed to be reintegrated into South African society. The organisation maintained that case studies on how ex-combatants involved in conflicts in Zimbabwe and Kosovo had fared in terms of reintegration showed that South Africa was facing an issue that was pregnant with possibility and danger.
'If their needs go unmet, there is a real possibility that, over time, ex-combatants will become a significant force in society with the potential to de stabilise the young South African democracy,' the authors of the report, Only Useful Until Democracy, have warned.
However, they also pointed out that if the reintegration issue was addressed effectively ex-combatants could help to overcome the interracial mistrust that apartheid has caused in South Africa. As part of the research for the report authors David Everatt and Ross Jennings questioned 1200 mainly African ex-combatants from the apartheid era on different issues, ranging from how the conflict has affected them psychologically, to their current economic and social circumstances.
Almost a fifth (17 per cent) of them stated they had been injured and had been left with a permanent disability as a result of the injury. More than half (56 per cent) still relive their experience while they are awake and a similar proportion suffer from combat related nightmares.
One in eight (13 per cent) of the ex-combatants interviewed could be classified as experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder, which is defined as a pathological anxiety that usually occurs after an individual experiences or witnesses severe trauma that threatens their lives.
Less than one in five (18 per cent) of the respondents said they were part of the process of creating a single integrated defence force - the post-apartheid South African National Defence Force (SANDF) - from all of the major anti-apartheid military formations.
In addition, between 1996 and 2000 more than half of those ex-combatants who had joined SANDF had left, which was blamed on racism, conflict, suspicion and poorly designed and implemented systems. 'This is a damning comment on the process of reintegration. It is fair to conclude that from the perspective of the 1200 ex-combatants in our sample, demobilisation and integration into the SANDF were fatally flawed,' according to the report.
Further research questions found that nearly half of all ex-combatants were living in a household headed by their parents or grandparents, and the vast majority of them (60 per cent) remain single because they are unable to form stable relationships.
A common theme mentioned by ex-combatants is that many of them gave up their chance of an education to join the armed struggle, and this claim is borne out by the fact that almost two-thirds (64 per cent) were students at the time they joined the conflict.
Today only one-quarter (26 per cent) have successfully completed secondary education level exams. In addition, a little under three quarters (70 per cen t) were unemployed at the time they were interviewed.
When the sample group of ex-combatants was asked whether they thought South Africa's political leaders gave up caring about them after 1994, nearly three-quarters (73 per cent) said they thought this to be the case.
The vast majority of ex-combatants (84 per cent) across the different military formations agreed that the compensation they received had been inadequate.
Interestingly, three-quarters (75 per cent) of ex-combatants keep in touch with each other, and they also seem to adhere to the leadership structures that they served under, with seven out of ten respondents saying they have kept in close contact with the leadership of their armed formation since 1990.
When asked to assess in hindsight whether they had achieved anything for themselves by getting involved in the fight against apartheid, nearly half the respondents said they had 'wasted their time for nothing'.
Many ex-combatants said they would take up arms again even knowing what they know now about the consequences for them in post-apartheid South Africa, but there was a sizeable minority (34 per cent) who said they would not get involved again if such a situation arose.
'We are in a situation where, over a decade into democracy, many ex-combatants were not officially demobilised, assessed or assisted (financially or otherwise), and are struggling to move out of the past and become fully engaged citizens in the "new" South Africa.
'Given their socio-economic Circumstances, which see seven in ten out of work, compensation is unavoidably an important issue, and the inadequacy of compensation (and by implication the demobilisation process) is increasingly becoming a rallying call for ex-combatants,' the report says.
For an example of how ex-combatants can destabilise a country one only needs to look at the roll Zimbabwe's former liberation fighters have played in the country's political crisis and economic collapse over the last 15 years.
In 1989 discontented former ex-combatants from ZANLA and ZIPRA put aside their historical differences and established the Zimbabwe War Veterans Association.
In 1997 the militant Chenjerai "Hitler" Hunzvi took over the ZWVA and instigated violent street protests by war veterans because they were being "ignored" by the government. This led to huge unbudgeted financial pay-outs being made to war veterans from the country's war of independence with Zimbabwe's racist white ruling regime of the 1970s, which analysts say contributed to the country's economic spiral downwards.
By the end of the century the war veterans were also used by President Robert Mugabe as a militant group to attack his political adversaries. They were encouraged to invade white-owned farms and took over thousands of properties across the country in the early part of the 21st century, a development that led to the collapse of Zimbabwe's agricultural sector and contributed to the demise of the wider economy.
There are fears, mainly amongst South Africa's middle classes, which provides most of the country's tax base, that if government gives into the demands of the war veterans, a similar outcome that occurred in Zimbabwe could materialise.
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