Former combatant’s lonely pension battle drags on

Nelson “Baker” Phasha is not among the 2 700 former military veterans who are taking the government to court in a bid to secure reparations and a pension for their contribution to the liberation struggle.

But Phasha, 61, a former member of the Azanian People’s Liberation Army (Apla), has been fighting his own solitary battle with the department of defence, the treasury and the Government Pensions Administration Agency to secure a pension since 1996.

Phasha suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of the torture he underwent at the hands of apartheid security police in 1988, when he was arrested crossing back into South Africa from Botswana.

He had undergone military training abroad and was caught with a duffle bag full of Scorpion machine pistols intended for Apla cells operating in Gauteng. He was beaten and tortured for several days while in detention.

Phasha was charged for the weapons and for an earlier arson attack on municipal offices in Tembisa but was released on a technicality and went back into exile.

He returned to South Africa, married and went about a normal life as a small business person but his experience in detention still haunts him.

In 1996, Phasha was among the thousands of former combatants who applied for the special pension offered by the state but was turned down on the grounds that he had not spent five years in the full-time military service of the Pan Africanist Congress.

After several years of attempting to have the refusal overturned, Phasha  eventually went to court, securing an order against the treasury, the South African National Defence Force and the Government Employees Pension Fund in 2013.

But he withdrew the action because he had been invited to apply for a military pension in 2010. He was eventually granted the military pension.

In August 2019, Phasha’s military pension was stopped and he says he has been battling to have it reinstated ever since, approaching parliament, the defence ministry, the presidency and the treasury in the process.

Phasha said this week that the bureaucracy around the pensions process had made it almost impossible for veterans such as himself, who had made their contribution to the struggle, to obtain support from the system.

“I am a former freedom fighter who was arrested for my activities and underwent torture and injury during my detention and incarceration. I was denied the special pension on dubious grounds, which the treasury did not contest.

“I was then invited to apply for the military pension, which I did. It was granted in 2017 and then [it was] taken away again in 2019. I am now being asked to provide a psychologist’s report and reports on my mental state,” he said.

“I don’t have the resources to do that out of my own pocket or the means to move about to submit reports. I also feel that when I do this, it takes me back to the trenches and makes me relive the entire experience again.

“They granted the pension — why should I have to do this over and over again?”

Kabelo Jonathan, a senior manager for special pensions with the Government Pensions Administration Agency, said they were still trying to resolve Phasha’s situation.

With regard to the special pension, Phasha had taken the matter to court and “subsequently abandoned the matter through his attorneys”, Jonathan said.

“In relation to his military pension, his matter is under review and the office is waiting for a progress report from him.”