South Africa: Media Statement - Committee On Defence and Military Veterans Adopts Budget Vote 26

15 May 2026
Parliament of South Africa (Cape Town)
press release

The Portfolio Committee on Defence and Military Veterans has today adopted its draft report on Budget Vote 26: Department of Military Veterans (DMV) after having considered the departments' 2026/27 annual performance plan (APP) and budget.

During the recent deliberations with the department, the committee had expressed concerns over persistent vacancies within the department, particularly critical senior management posts, including the continued vacancy of the Director-General position. The committee raised concerns over the apparent prioritisation of administrative expenditure and Compensation of Employees over direct service delivery to military veterans.

Members of the committee expressed a grave concern over the devastating consequences as a result of the depletion of the department's budget in the middle of the financial year leaving the department unable to pay military veterans the benefits they are entitled to. The committee also said the delays in the processing and payment of pensions and benefits to military veterans, including reports that the GPAA is failing to meet the required turnaround times for pension applications, were a serious concern.

Furthermore, the 2025 instruction by the committee on the establishment of a fully functional call centre was not complied with, and the call centre remains inefficient. Calls are not answered and no response to emails. Members of the committee noted that this constitutes a serious service delivery failure to the military veterans community.

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The committee was also not pleased that the database cleansing remains unresolved as well as digitisation, causing a number of beneficiaries to miss out on benefits due to delays in finalising it. The committee said it was heartbreaking that military veterans have been struggling for at least 15 years just to get their benefits and now suffer because of administrative issues.

The committee requested that the DMV submit the terms of reference, composition, mandate, and deliverables of the transversal ministerial task team Including clear timelines. Most importantly, the Committee also requested the DMV to resubmit its APP to include better formulated targets that can be tracked for actual service-delivery throughout the year.

Read the original article on Parliament of South Africa.

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