Thirteen South African National Defence Force (SANDF) soldiers died last week during skirmishes with M23 rebels near Goma, the capital of North Kivu province in eastern DRC. The South African soldiers were part of the SADC and UN peacekeeping missions.

Motshekga said that Ramaphosa has been in constant contact with DRC President Félix Tshisekedi and other SADC leaders in the region. She said:

There are also discussions which include Rwanda because it is alleged to be one of the big perpetrators, which is why we are keeping communications with them.

They have been friendly, there has been no hostility against us, it’s just when they were firing above our heads.

The president did warn them [Rwanda] that if you are going to fire, we will take it as a declaration of war and we will have to defend our people. That is when the firing also stopped.

Motshekga denied allegations that South African soldiers deployed to the DRC are poorly equipped. She said that during her meeting with Generals in Goma, no shortage of ammunition was reported. She said:

I personally went to Goma and I got a briefing from all the Generals. At no stage did they say they had no ammunition.

We reinforce on the basis that because there’s been this escalated hostilities, then we spoke back home with the meeting that General attended with the National Council of Arms to say it’s going to be very important for us to reinforce, to make sure that we don’t reach a stage where we don’t have.

But at no stage did any of the Generals that I spoke to, even the first leader, say to me, we’ve run out of ammunition. No. Even Tanzania was reinforcing, and even itself DRC was reinforcing.

The DRC and the head of UN peacekeeping have confirmed the presence of Rwandan troops in Goma, supporting their M23 allies.

Rwanda has said it is defending itself against threats from DRC militias but has not directly addressed whether its troops have crossed the border. Said Motshekga:

When we were at Goma, the DRC forces were fighting Rwandan forces over our heads, that is where we lost three people, so we had to quickly communicate with M23 to say we are not part of the battle so don’t fight over our heads.

We agreed that we would hoist our white flag to say we are not part of the battle, we are not going to be dragged into it.

So we agreed on a ceasefire for free passage. We will not fire at their movement, so there was a clear ceasefire which was agreed by the generals from M23 but also by our generals.