A Soweto security company had its PSiRA accreditation suspended yet still held 100 firearms in a storage facility police found non-compliant. The case exposes worrying gaps between firearms regulation, enforcement and accountability, and raises questions about how long the weapons remained there.
By Staff Reporter
The seizure of 100 firearms and ammunition from a Soweto security company has raised questions about how effectively SAPS and the Private Security Industry Regulatory Authority (PSiRA) monitor firearms when security companies lose their accreditation.
The firearms were seized by members of the South African Police Service (SAPS) deployed under Operation Buyisa during a compliance inspection on Saturday, 22 August 2026.
According to SAPS, the company’s PSiRA accreditation had recently been suspended, after which the responsible person allegedly failed to dispose of the firearms as required under the Firearms Control Act, 60 of 2000.
The police also found that the company’s firearm storage facility did not comply with the requirements of the Act.
The 100 firearms will now undergo ballistic testing to establish whether any have been used in the commission of crimes.
Jonathan Deal, director of Safe Citizen, said SAPS deserved credit for recovering the firearms, but argued that the seizure raised more serious questions about what happened between the company’s suspension and the police operation.
“SAPS deserves credit for this seizure, but the credit stops where the timeline starts,” Deal said.
“If PSiRA suspended this company’s accreditation and it was still sitting on a hundred firearms in a non-compliant store when police arrived, then the regulators, not just the company, have questions to answer about how that was allowed to happen — and for how long.”
Deal cautioned that Safe Citizen did not know the specific circumstances surrounding the company, including its compliance history or internal explanation, and was therefore not passing judgement on the company itself.
His concern, he said, was the broader regulatory pattern suggested by the SAPS account.
“On the numbers SAPS has put out, this is serious — not because private security firms should not hold firearms — they legitimately do for legitimate protective work — but because of what happened after this one lost its accreditation,” Deal said.
He argued that the case pointed to a potential weakness in the way firearms are monitored when a security provider’s regulatory status changes.
“Once a security provider’s PSiRA status changes, there does not appear to be an automatic, immediate mechanism forcing surrender or verified storage of its firearms,” he said.
“That is the part that should worry the industry and regulators, not just this one case.”
Deal said a suspension of a security company’s accreditation should immediately trigger a verified accounting of every firearm in its possession.
“The moment a security provider is no longer accredited, there should be a mandated, time-bound process: firearms surrendered to SAPS, transferred to a properly licensed dealer, or placed under verified safekeeping,” he said.
“Not left in the hands of a company that, by definition, no longer meets the standard required to hold them.”
The case also raised questions about the relationship between PSiRA’s regulatory functions and SAPS’s responsibility for firearms control, Deal said.
“PSiRA regulates the company’s right to operate; SAPS, through the Firearms Control Act, regulates who may lawfully possess and store firearms,” he said.
“When those two processes are not tightly linked — when a PSiRA suspension does not automatically trigger an urgent SAPS compliance check — you get this scenario: a company that has lost its right to trade but kept its arsenal, for however long, until someone eventually checked.”
Deal said the condition of the company’s firearm storage facility was particularly troubling. “This is not a private collector with a few licensed firearms; it is a company whose entire commercial model depends on issuing weapons to personnel and retrieving them safely,” he said.
“If the storage facility did not meet the legal requirements, that is a failure at the core of what a security company is supposed to be trustworthy about.”
He said inadequate storage could create opportunities for legally held firearms to be stolen or diverted into the illegal firearms market.
“Non-compliant storage is one of the more direct routes by which legally held firearms end up in the illegal market — through theft, through loss that is never properly reported, or through informal movement that is never reconciled,” Deal said.
“With a company holding around a hundred firearms, weak storage is not a marginal risk; it is a meaningful point of potential diversion.”
Deal called for a broader national audit of firearms held by private security companies, particularly those whose PSiRA registrations or accreditations have been suspended or cancelled.
“At minimum, PSiRA and SAPS should be able to say, today, exactly how many firearms are held by every security company whose accreditation is currently suspended or cancelled, and confirm each of those holdings has been verified,” he said.
“If that list does not already exist and get checked routinely, this case is reason enough to build it and act on it immediately, not to wait for the next seizure to make headlines.”
The seizure also raises questions about whether firearms can fall into what Deal described as an administrative grey area when a security company’s accreditation changes.
“A firearm does not stop existing when a company’s certificate lapses — but on this evidence, the system’s attention to it seems to,” he said.
Deal said a company being suspended or deregistered should automatically trigger a firearms audit.
“Instead, what we appear to have here is firearms sitting in a kind of administrative limbo — no longer under an active, monitored security operation, but also not yet accounted for by the state,” he said.
“That gap is exactly where firearms can go missing without anyone immediately noticing.”
The forthcoming ballistic testing could prove particularly significant. SAPS has said it will test the seized firearms to determine whether they have been used in crimes.
Deal said the testing would help establish whether the firearms represented a compliance failure alone or whether some may already have entered the criminal economy.
“It will tell us whether any of these hundred firearms have already been used in crimes, which would confirm that the gap we are describing is not theoretical — it has already been exploited,” he said.
He added that a negative result would also be significant because it would indicate that the firearms had been exposed to a risk of diversion but had not, at least according to the ballistic evidence, been linked to criminal activity.
“If even a handful of these hundred come back linked to crimes, it is direct evidence that the private security sector’s compliance gaps are not a victimless administrative failure — they carry a real cost,” Deal said.
Safe Citizen is concerned about firearms being diverted from legitimate private security operations into criminal networks, although Deal said there was no reliable national figure showing the scale of that specific risk.
“That data gap is itself part of the problem,” he said, arguing that private security firearms holdings deserved at least as much scrutiny as those of private civilian owners.
Deal welcomed the SAPS seizure under Operation Buyisa, but said the recovery of the firearms should not be confused with effective preventative regulation.
“Confiscating the firearms at the end of the story is good policing. It does not undo the fact that the story should have ended months earlier,” he said.
“Arriving with confiscations and arrests after a company had already lost its accreditation and was left holding a full arsenal in a non-compliant facility is not, on its own, a demonstration that the regulatory framework is working — it points the other way.”
Operation Buyisa was established in 2025 as a national intervention aimed at removing illegal firearms from circulation and promoting compliance with the Firearms Control Act among lawful firearm owners.
Deal said the operation demonstrated that SAPS could successfully recover firearms, but argued that greater emphasis was needed on preventing such situations from developing.
He called for more frequent and unannounced firearms-compliance inspections of private security companies, particularly those whose accreditation status had changed.
“A scheduled inspection regime is predictable, and predictable oversight is oversight a non-compliant operator can plan around,” he said.
Deal also called for accountability for the individuals responsible for firearms held by security companies.
“If SAPS’s account is accurate, the people in charge here failed a clear legal duty, and that failure should be treated with the same seriousness as any other unlawful possession case, not softened because it happened inside a security company rather than a private home,” he said.
Among the reforms proposed by Safe Citizen is an automatic firearms audit whenever a security company’s PSiRA accreditation is suspended or cancelled.
Deal also wants a real-time information-sharing system between PSiRA and the SAPS Central Firearms Registry, allowing a change in a company’s regulatory status to trigger immediate action on its firearms holdings.
He further called for regular, unannounced inspections of private security firearms storage facilities.
For Deal, the central issue raised by the Soweto seizure is therefore not simply the number of firearms recovered, but the period during which they remained in the company’s possession after its accreditation was suspended.
“The headline is a hundred firearms seized. The real story is how long they sat there before anyone noticed,” he said.
SAPS has not, in its statement, indicated how long the firearms remained with the company after the suspension of its PSiRA accreditation, what prompted the compliance inspection or whether any of the seized firearms have already been linked to criminal investigations.
Those questions are likely to become more significant as the ballistic testing proceeds and authorities establish the circumstances surrounding the company’s possession and storage of the firearms.