SA government is losing 1,800 firearms a year to criminals

There are 2.2-million firearms owned by 502 state entities in South Africa. Of these, an estimated 1,800 are being lost or stolen every year, entering the illicit market and finding their way into the hands of criminals.

Yet, the only state entity that reports some of its lost or stolen firearms is the police. SAPS, along with the South African National Defence Force (SANDF), own less than 30% of the total number of state-owned firearms.

Speaking on Thursday at an Institute for Security Studies (ISS) seminar focusing on its latest policy brief, Targeting firearm crime will make South Africa safer, Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime researcher Jenni Irish-Qhobosheane said the SANDF and other state entities were supposed to report their firearm losses and thefts to the Central Firearms Registry (CFR), but they do not do this.

“They don’t. They simply don’t,” she said, adding that it was “shocking”.

She said analysis by the Civilian Secretariat for Police, gathering information on losses between 2003 and 2013 gleaned from media reports and information from the CFR, concluded that the total loss of firearms was 18,000 over the 10-year period.

Meanwhile, the average number of firearm-related murders in South Africa has risen from 23 per day in the 2021/22 financial year, to 34.

Illegal firearms entering South Africa from across the borders has decreased, and “a far more concerning factor is the domestic sources”, Irish-Qhobosheane said.

While police report the loss or theft of police-issue firearms (those carried by officers), the loss or theft of firearms under its jurisdiction, such as those kept as evidence and those handed in for destruction during amnesty periods, is not reported.

Irish-Qhobosheane said former police minister Bheki Cele acknowledged that at least 357 firearms had vanished from evidence stores between April 2020 and November 2023.

“We don’t believe this is an accurate figure,” Irish-Qhobosheane said, as 178 of those firearms had gone missing from a single station – Norwood. This was only discovered when police from another station were following up on weapons used in a cash-in-transit heist in which a police officer was killed.

“When they checked with forensics, one of those firearms was listed as being in the evidence store in Norwood.”

It was only then that they discovered 178 firearms had gone missing, she said.

In 2016, Vereeniging-based cop Colonel Chris Lodewyk Prinsloo pleaded guilty to selling firearms to Cape Flats gangs and other criminal networks. Prinsloo, a custodian of an SAPS armoury, confessed to selling 2,400 firearms, but Irish-Qhobosheane believes the figure was much higher – about 9,000.

Fraudulent firearms licences issued through corruption to underworld figures and challenges with the Central Firearms Registry are also a problem, as illustrated in current court cases.

She said while 63,500 licensed civilian firearms had been lost or stolen between 2013 and 2023, the recovery rate was relatively high at about 60%.

In the period 2003 to 2023, about 30,000 police issued firearms were reported lost or stolen, but the recovery rate was “significantly lower” than for civilian arms. This raises the question of whether many of those firearms had not actually been lost or stolen, but were “handed over” to criminals.

The number of firearms lost or stolen from the SANDF is unknown. Media reports and parliamentary questions have revealed a “significant number” have gone missing.

As with the Norwood police station, theft of SANDF firearms has sometimes been discovered by default. This was the case at the Lyttleton army base in Pretoria where 19 assault rifles were stolen in 2019.

“If you scan the annual reports of SAPS you’ll see figures like: 67 firearms lost by government departments. Then you scan the media and you see that one metropolitan police department lost 700 weapons in that same year. So how were only 67 across all government departments reported to the police?” asked Irish-Qhobosheane.

The SANDF did not report ammunition theft and loss, but at least 330 rounds of R4 ammunition were lost in 2018/19. Meanwhile, the police, she said, lost 9 million rounds between 2014 and 2019.

This indicated that while police were trying to empty the pool of illegal firearms, having arrested 125,000 people for possession of illegal firearms and ammunition between 2014 and 2023, “the tap was still running”.

Cases involving firearms lost by the state were also stalled or missing. She cited a 2014 case in which  “more than half” of 300 illegal firearms (112 of which were assault rifles) found in a civilian home in Norwood were found to have come from the state. Despite promises of an investigation and her continually following up on the case “for the last three years”, the case has disappeared.

Need for crime intelligence

Central Firearms Registry dysfunctional