Should SA renew its anti-piracy operation in the Mozambique Channel?

Despite the navy’s severe resource constraints, Operation Copper seems to have been continued for political rather than practical reasons.

Published on 11 June 2026 in ISS Today

By

Timothy Walker
Senior Researcher, Transnational Threats and Organised Crime, ISS

Since 2011, the South African National Defence Force (SANDF), primarily the navy, has conducted Operation Copper in the northern Mozambique Channel to deter piracy and other maritime crime. The annual renewal of the operation has long raised questions.

For over a decade, there has been no sustained piracy threat in the area. And for at least the past four years, the navy has lacked the capacity to execute Operation Copper meaningfully. This suggests the mission has been sustained for political reasons rather than its ability to prevent piracy.

But since the expiry of the operation’s 1 April 2025 to 31 March 2026 mandate, Parliament has not been informed of any renewal by President Cyril Ramaphosa. Does this signal that it has quietly ended?

Although launched for good reasons and executed skilfully by the SANDF, there is little publicly available evidence showing a continued need for Operation Copper based on its value in preventing piracy.

The operation emerged directly from the hijacking of the Mozambican fishing vessel Vega 5 in late 2010. The incident seemed to suggest that the southward expansion of Somali piracy into the Mozambique Channel from 2008 to 2010 was unavoidable.

There is little public evidence of the need to continue Operation Copper based on its anti-piracy value

Pirates had used motherships to extend their endurance and range for years. Several assaults had approached the channel, which had been assumed safe as it was far from pirate hunting grounds. The attacks forced a sudden reappraisal. South Africa felt the attack struck a ‘raw nerve,’ imperilling its economy and that of its neighbours.

The assumption was that piracy could close the channel to shipping and cause devastating regional economic repercussions. As the only country in sub-Saharan Africa at the time with a blue-water navy capable of long-distance patrols, South Africa felt compelled to act swiftly.

These deployments catalysed national and regional actions throughout 2011, including: a cabinet-approved counter-piracy strategy; a Mozambique-South Africa memorandum of understanding; a Southern African Development Community (SADC) Maritime Security Strategy, and a trilateral patrol arrangement with Mozambique and Tanzania.

This served South Africa’s self-ascribed role as a regional security provider and its interest in providing leadership at a time when piracy was a salient and internationally recognised threat.

In 2011 and 2012, the country’s navy maintained near-continuous patrols. All its major available naval assets have been on station there at least once. These ships carried elements from the newly launched Maritime Reaction Squadron and ship-riders from Mozambique to take captured pirates into custody. This presence was supported by South African Air Force assets.

Despite heightened piracy threats, Operation Copper yielded few direct engagements. Only a single 2012 incident saw the Drakensberg support Spanish and Tanzanian vessels intercept a pirate ship. Tanzania’s exit from the trilateral arrangement that year eroded the deployment’s intended regional character, which was never restored.

From 2013, the operation lost capacity as SA relied more on offshore patrol vessels or intermittent deployments

From 2013, Operation Copper gradually lost intensity and capacity as South Africa relied more on offshore patrol vessels or intermittent deployments since its major combatants, the frigates and Drakensberg, had become unavailable. With the shift from continuous to periodic patrols, no ship has been on station since 2022 due to vessels needing repairs and maintenance.

Several arguments used to justify the operation are questionable. On more than one occasion, South African policymakers have correlated the absence of piracy with the operation’s existence and have assumed, rather than demonstrated, a direct causal relationship.

Speaking to South African media in 2014, then defence minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula said the reduction in piracy was ‘a result of our presence in the Mozambique Channel. … Now they know they can’t go down that far. The presence of the SANDF serves as a deterrent … if we go, the pirates may come back.’

This counterfactual argument has been unintentionally tested. During some periods without a sustained South African naval presence – since 2022 and arguably as early as 2012 – piracy did not return to the Mozambique Channel.

Had pirate groups viewed the area as both permissive and lucrative after naval patrols diminished, exploratory or opportunistic attacks might have re-emerged. Their absence undermines the claim that continuous SANDF naval presence alone prevented piracy’s return. Instead, broader structural factors likely shaped the limits of piracy’s expansion into the channel.

That does not prove Operation Copper was irrelevant. Over time, it has provided tangible benefits for the navy, such as accruing valuable hours at sea, which provides operational experience, maritime domain awareness and intelligence. The operation also signalled that South Africa would not leave maritime security to external powers.

Rather than expanding into a genuinely regional effort, the operation remains dependent on SA

But these gains have been uneven and costly. Deployments were often limited by unavailable platforms and by instances in which vessels broke down en route or were not deployable due to maintenance backlogs.

Rather than expanding into a genuinely collective regional effort, the operation remains narrow and dependent on South Africa. Even so, it continues to be justified in regional terms.

One of the rationales for the 2011 SADC Maritime Security Strategy was that piracy was a shared threat, requiring collective responsibility. Yet burden-sharing has not materialised in the form of joint patrols or other SADC countries deploying their own naval assets to replace South Africa’s.

Operation Copper risks appearing as a national deployment under the SADC name, but largely detached from – and not demonstrably advancing – the region’s maritime security strategy. Such a shift demands transparency around what the operation has delivered, including published outcomes assessments, clearer accounting of resource allocation, and a rigorous evaluation of impact.

Otherwise, Operation Copper risks remaining a paper deployment increasingly decoupled from its original rationale and threat profile, and sustained less by necessity than by institutional continuity and unresolved political logic.


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