Giant failure to control guns allows crimes to proliferate

An AK-47 and three pistols recovered from suspects in the April 2024 murder of engineer Armand Swart became more than just evidence. They became a smoking gun exposing the depth of police corruption and collusion with organised crime.

- Stanley Maphosa

When these firearms were forensically analysed and linked to multiple murders, they revealed what KwaZulu-Natal's police commissioner, Lieutenant General Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi, described in his testimony to the Madlanga Commission as a sophisticated criminal network with "significant access to finance".

This discovery sparked the establishment of both the Madlanga Commission and the parliamentary ad hoc committee that are investigating allegations of criminality and political interference in South Africa's criminal justice system.

While these proceedings have captivated the nation with testimony about political interference and syndicate infiltration, insufficient attention has been paid to a critical enabler of this crisis: the historic, systematic breakdown of South Africa's firearms management system.

As Gun Free South Africa's recent submission to the parliamentary ad hoc committee details, this breakdown manifests across three devastating areas: corruption in firearms record-keeping tenders, fraud at the Central Firearms Registry, and the leaking of police-held firearms to criminals.

Decades of corruption

The rot runs deep and stretches back decades. Consider the Waymark Infotech tender of 2004, which cost taxpayers R412-million (ballooning from an initial R42-million), yet failed to deliver a working firearms management system.

Despite questions raised about the tender award process and the Auditor-General's findings of fruitless expenditure, not a single official was held accountable, and a Hawks investigation seems to have quietly died.

Fast-forward to today, and there are serious concerns that the current Providence Software Solutions contract will mirror past failures, with insufficient parliamentary oversight to prevent another expensive debacle. This record-keeping chaos creates the perfect conditions for criminals to thrive.