PSIRA must explain how a R130 million training contract produced just 118 accreditations from 6,507 registered learners. The SIU and Hawks must follow the evidence wherever it leads, recover public money and ensure anyone implicated in criminal conduct faces the full force of law.
By Jonathan Deal
This past week, the Special Investigating Unit and the Hawks entered PSIRA’s Centurion offices with a search-and-seizure warrant and left with documents, computers and cellphones linked to a training project meant to build capacity in the private security industry.
Instead, the project has become an ugly demonstration of the very dysfunction PSIRA has spent the past year lecturing that same industry about, with millions of rands paid out, thousands of learners registered and barely a fraction accredited.
The figures, confirmed by the SIU itself, are hard to look at without asking how an institution entrusted with regulating an entire industry let something like this happen under its own roof.
The training contract was worth roughly R130 million and covered Election Observer Training, End-User Computing Training and PSIRA Grade E to C Training for security officers. 6,507 learners were registered. Only 118 were accredited — less than 2%. R30.18 million was paid out in advance, before equivalent services were ever delivered.
When investigators asked PSIRA for the full paper trail, they did not get it.
An entire year’s worth of documents was missing. The SIU’s own spokesperson put it plainly: invoices had been paid, generated and processed, but “there was no value for money”. Investigators eventually had to approach the Special Tribunal for a warrant because ordinary engagement with the regulator had failed to produce what they needed.
And this did not happen without a fight. Portfolio Committee on Police chairperson Ian Cameron says his committee had been pushing for the investigation for more than a year, and that PSIRA even tried to have him removed from chairing the very meeting where the committee demanded answers. “We refused to be intimidated,” he says.
Here Is Why This Matters Beyond One Bad Contract.
This is the same regulator that has spent this year pushing new firearm regulations onto the private security industry, restricting a sector it has repeatedly accused of needing tighter control, greater oversight and stricter compliance. Yet PSIRA could not, on the evidence now before investigators, account for the delivery of a R130 million training programme, could not produce a full year of its own records when those records were demanded, and required a search warrant before investigators could obtain the material they were looking for.
An institution that cannot keep its own procurement and records in order has little credibility when it lectures a lawful industry about compliance.
This outcome exists because Ian Cameron’s committee refused to let the matter disappear. A year of sustained pressure, resistance from the very body being investigated, and the matter has now reached the point where investigators are executing a search warrant. That is what oversight is supposed to look like, and Safe Citizen is glad to see it.
Safe Citizen’s position is straightforward: follow the evidence, recover every cent and prosecute anyone implicated in criminal conduct, fully and without the kind of delay that has come to define so many other institutional failures we have covered this year.
But behind the millions, the warrants, the missing records and the institutional buck-passing are 6,389 people who signed up to learn, expected to walk away with something that could strengthen their livelihoods, and instead appear to have been left with nothing. They are not a line in an SIU statement or a statistic in an investigation; they are people whose time was taken, whose expectations were raised and whose opportunity was wasted.
And the taxpayers who funded the project have every right to ask the question that PSIRA must now answer: where did the money go, and who is going to account for it?
Jonathan Deal is the Executive Board Member and National Co-ordinator at Safe Citizen.