On the morning of 16 June 2026, officers from SAPS Magaliesburg pulled over four suspects along the R24 road in Gauteng. Inside a Volvo truck with Namibian registration plates, parked behind a Mazda sedan, they found eight AK-47 rifles and seven empty magazines. It was one seizure on one morning. Yet it sits at the centre of a much larger story about how guns move through South Africa, and how weapons that begin their lives as legal property end up in the hands of people prepared to use them violently.
That story reached Parliament on Wednesday, 7 October, where Lieutenant General Dumisani Khumalo told the police committee that firearms were the “instrument of choice” in most violent crimes. Illegal weapons, he said, were entering the criminal economy from a range of sources, including the police service itself and the private security industry. He also acknowledged that guns were being smuggled across South Africa’s borders, and that police had identified some of the routes and were working with neighbouring countries to intercept them.
The hearing was prompted, in part, by a question with an uncomfortable history in the Western Cape. DA MP Dianne Kohler Barnard wanted to know how police could stand behind their claim that more than 6,000 illegal firearms had been recovered when the figure was not supported by audit evidence. The Auditor-General indicated that SAPS’s actual performance may have been better than reported. But Barnard pressed the deeper point: if the service cannot independently verify the recovery figure, can it account for every firearm it says it has taken off the street?
For communities living with gang violence, that question is not abstract. The most prominent case involved Colonel Christiaan Prinsloo, a former police officer and convicted arms dealer who in 2016 admitted to selling firearms and ammunition to gangsters. The case exposed a critical vulnerability: weapons placed under police control for destruction could be diverted into the criminal underworld. The people on the receiving end were ordinary residents of neighbourhoods where guns circulate for years.
Deputy National Commissioner for policing Lieutenant General Tebello Mosikili acknowledged that police were recovering illegal firearms, but “not in the numbers that we would want to”. Many of the weapons ending up in criminal hands, she said, had once been legally owned before being stolen or diverted from civilians, private institutions and state actors. Some had been taken from officials who had, in some cases, lost their lives.
She pointed to intensified border operations with neighbouring SADC countries, citing the Gauteng seizure as an example. Domestically, Operation Shanela and intelligence-led operations continue to recover illegal weapons. On the legal side, Mosikili said SAPS had a 120-day target for processing licence applications, but stricter checks under the Firearms Control Act could result in delays. “We cannot simply issue licences where there are red flags,” she said, stressing that applications had to be thoroughly vetted so that legally acquired firearms do not end up in criminal hands.
Meanwhile, the numbers themselves came under scrutiny. Major General Leon Rabie presented the SAPS annual report to the committee, covering murder, rape, contact crimes against women and children, extortion, visible policing and the recovery of illegal firearms. He said SAPS achieved 52.13% of its targets while spending 100% of its R120.899-billion budget in 2025/26. “We do not hide from this figure,” he said, though he argued the number should be read alongside the direction of crime: contact crime had decreased by 5.2%, and murder fell by 9.4%, bringing the murder rate down to 36.72 per 100,000 of the population.
Claire Taylor, a research and policy analyst at Gun Free South Africa who has worked on gun violence prevention for more than 15 years, welcomed the scrutiny from the Auditor-General and Parliament. “For too long, the role guns play in driving violence in South Africa has been ignored. These questions are overdue and crucial, and we hope they lead to real action in how guns are managed,” she said. In her view, the biggest source of illegal weapons is legal firearms already in the country. “We must stop legal stocks leaking into the illegal pool,” she said.
Taylor argued that full control over every legal firearm was needed, whether held by the state, civilians or businesses such as private security companies and firearms dealers, with the same controls applied to recovered or surrendered weapons. The systems used to record, store, manage and destroy firearms had to be strengthened, properly implemented and independently overseen. Central to this, she said, was fixing the Central Firearms Registry so that every firearm and its owner could be traced at any time. The registry, she argued, had never worked as intended and would not without proper oversight and accountability, both of which had been lacking for 15 years. “We hope these tough questions mark a real turning point, and that they do not end in Parliament. The police must answer for their duties under the Firearms Control Act and be held accountable for failures to implement it,” she said.
By contrast, the hearing also laid bare a different kind of consequence, one felt in recruitment queues rather than on the street. The cancellation of the R228-million Medicare24 contract has forced SAPS to turn to the SANDF to help complete mandatory medical assessments for recruits. Acting National Police Commissioner Puleng Dimpane was blunt: “The issue of trainees, indeed we were unable to recruit the 5,500 we had planned for mainly because of the contract issue. Yes, I will say it is the Matlala contract issue.”
The contract, awarded in June 2024 to Medicare24 Tshwane District, a company linked to Vusimuzi “Cat” Matlala, was meant to provide medical screening and health-risk management for SAPS personnel and recruits. It was terminated in January 2025 amid investigations into alleged procurement irregularities and corruption, and later became a key thread in investigations into Matlala and alleged corruption within SAPS. Following evidence before the Madlanga Commission, National Police Commissioner General Fannie Masemola was suspended, and 12 police officials along with Matlala’s business associate James Murray were charged. Masemola was cleared last month of four PFMA-related charges linked to the tender. The contract was budgeted at R360-million, but allegations before the commission included claims that collusion with police officials resulted in it being awarded to Matlala’s company for R228-million.
The operational fallout is concrete. Rabie said SAPS had 182,676 personnel, 5,340 below its establishment target, while not a single entry-level trainee had been enlisted against a target of 5,500. He attributed the shortfall to the termination of the health-risk management contract, which halted mandatory medical assessments. “This intake was deferred to the current financial year, increasing the target for the current financial year to 11,000 trainees,” he said. SAPS has since turned to the SANDF for medical evaluations, while entry requirements have been raised to Grade 12 and a driver’s licence.
For the communities where illegal guns circulate, the stakes run in both directions: fewer police recruits on the streets, and a firearms system whose leaks, as the hearing made clear, have already cost lives. Whether the committee’s questions translate into a registry that finally works, and a recruitment pipeline that recovers, remains the open question hanging over the year ahead.