Way off Target
Text: Gavin Foster. Article from the September 2013 issue of Noseweek Magazine.
Failing gun control measures are costing South Africa billions.
Ever since the Firearm Control Act (FCA) of 2000 replaced the Arms and Ammunition Act of 1969, SAPS has lurched and stumbled erratically over implementing the new law.
In July a commission of inquiry into the Central Firearms Registiy (CFR) was set up after two police brigadiers were suspended following allegations of bribery, corruption and arranging firearms licences and temporary permits for various gangsters, terrorists and self-confessed murderers.
The suspensions were not a first for the registry; it suspended most of its senior management in 2004 for allegedly similar behaviour. Then, there were no convictions but most of the suspended police officers left the force rather than return to work.
An insider tells Noseweek that they were victimised because they objected to many of the irregular methods used by their bosses to implement the FCA.
In 2010 there was another flurry of activity when the registiy suspended its abrasive head, Brigadier Jaco Bothma, claiming he’d failed to meet his goals and alleging that his office had shown favouritism in approving licences and permits to some people and institutions. Allegations of bribery and corruption in the CFR were also raised.
In the most recent drama, Brigadier Mathapelo Merriam Mangwane, section head of the registry and her sidekick, Brigadier Hlamane Elias Mahlabane, were suspended without pay while criminal investigations are undertaken. Their purported self-enrichment propensities were uncovered during an investigation into two employees of Dave Sheer Guns who were arrested by military police at OR Tambo International Airport for allegedly dealing in stolen military ammunition worth about R1 million.
During the investigation an employee of the gun shop told the Hawks that she had personally delivered large sums of cash to Mangwane at the behest of her employers twice every month, to ensure the swift processing of licences for customers. These included convicted Nigerian terrorist Henry Okah and self-confessed killer Mikey Schultz, who was granted immunity from prosecution when he turned State witness against Glenn Agliotti after pulling the trigger on Brett Kebble.
When the government started working on the new Firearms Control Act in the late 1990s there was uproar in the pro-gun community. Opponents of the proposed act pointed out that the requirements would be impossible to meet without an enormous budget and thousands of extra police staff. More than two million licensed gun owners would be obliged to apply for new licences for their 3.7 million weapons and there was a minefield of red tape to be negotiated on both sides.
Applicants first had to attend courses at accredited training institutions, then apply to the Central Firearms Registry for the required certificates of competency before applying for the licence itself.
When the government started working on the new Firearms Control Act in the late 1990s there was uproar in the pro-gun community
There were limitations on numbers of weapons licenced, but competitors in organised competition, bona fide collectors, and hunting association members could achieve Dedicated Hunter, Sportsmen or Collector status and would be entitled to additional licences if justified.
For the police officers working with the applications, the task was no less complex. They’d have to interview each applicant, take fingerprints, and perform background checks by questioning their spouses, neighbours and nominated character witnesses. Police officers would also have to visit an applicant’s home to inspect the premises and confirm that there was a suitable gun safe before submitting the paperwork to the CFR office for a decision.
The relicensing process was planned to start in 2005 and be finished by the end of 2008, with deadlines determined by the applicant’s month of birth – those born in the first three months of the year would have to comply by 31 December 2005, and so on. Those who didn’t comply had until the end of June 2009 to legally dispose of their weapons or hand them to the police for destruction. After that deadline, the police repeatedly threatened, the owners would be arrested for illegal possession of unlicensed firearms. Despite the clause in the Firearms Control Act allowing for compensation – as dictated by the Constitution – police insisted that none would be paid.
Thousands of timid souls handed in their guns rather than endure the cumbersome process, while many more simply didn’t bother either to relicense or dispose of the weapons they’d already owned for years and which they believed they had a constitutional right to retain.
Early in 2005 things started to go wrong. The queues of people waiting to surrender their weapons added to the queues of those waiting to relicense, and the backlog grew and grew. With more than 500,000 people due to apply every year, the CFR could expect more than 2,000 relicensing applications to arrive from police stations every working day. This was on top of the new applications for guns that were being traded daily.
Despite pro-gun lobbyists insisting that the state had neither the manpower nor the budget to carry out such an exercise, police insisted that all was on track. When the CFR ran out of space to store the thousands of applications it hadn’t got around to processing, it instructed police stations to stop forwarding them to Pretoria until further notice, so piles of paper gathered dust in police stations for years.
The tap was not yet even fully open. Business Day reported on 20 September 2005 that, of the 600,000 expected renewal applications that year, only 20,000 had been received by September and those were being processed very slowly. People wanting new firearms fared no better. Of the 4,224 new applications in the first eight months of the year, just 813 had been processed, SAPS officials told parliament’s Safety and Security Committee.
Meanwhile stories started doing the rounds about guns that had been handed in for destruction resurfacing during robberies.
The police still insisted: no compensation for surrendered firearms, so the public decided to hang on to Grandpa’s R500,000 Purdey shotgun or Grandma’s R200 Baby Browning.
Meanwhile sales plummeted and 800 South African gunshops closed their doors because they could no longer make a living.
At the same time municipal traffic departments, SAPS and SANDF members lost – or sold – weapons at an increasing tempo, with little effort seemingly being made to close the door or recover them.
The pro-gun lobby became even more vociferous in stating the obvious – that South Africa couldn’t afford the whole process as it was – but the cops remained insistent that the programme was still on track.
Right at the beginning of the relicensing exercise somebody obviously felt the need to demonstrate just how serious the government was about getting guns out of unauthorised hands. Satirist Tom Sharpe could have done very well out of a book describing just what happened next.
On the morning of 13 January 2005 a heavily armed contingent of SAPS and SANDF heavies, accompanied by TV crews and newspaper journalists they’d invited to attend the show, descended on the South African National Museum of Military History in Saxonwold, Johannesburg. There they arrested Richard Henry, the museum’s curator of small arms and fighting vehicles, and Susanne Blendulf, curator of insignia and memorial plaques and editor of the South African Journal of Military History. Henry was arrested for being in possession of “stolen” armoured vehicles and numerous small arms without being in possession of valid firearm licences, while Blendulf, according to reports, was simply “talking too much”.
The director of the museum, John Keene, who had been in hospital recovering from eye surgery, rushed to the museum to sort out the mess. He too was arrested, handcuffed and with his two colleagues, locked up in a filthy cell overnight. Keene spent the night shackled to his bed while his wife begged to be permitted to administer his medication and pleaded for him to be allowed to return to hospital.
This was eventually acceded to after the prosecutor declined to press charges, but Keene’s retina became permanently detached and he subsequently lost his sight in one eye. He and his colleagues sued the state and in 2009 were awarded R450,000 in damages.
The state also found itself dragged into court in two other significant cases. In the first, the Justice Alliance of South Africa and the False Bay Gun Club went to court to force the state to pay compensation to the 100,000-plus people who had surrendered firearms without compensation, because they were afraid they’d be jailed once the relicensing deadline was reached. There was much toing-and-froing and the gun owners got their judgment but the state won on appeal in 2013, so those who had already relinquished their firearms will not be paid out.
A much more significant judgment was made in favour of the SA Hunters and Game Conservation Association on 29 June 2009 when the court ordered that the old green licences issued under the Arms and Ammunition Act would remain valid. Judge Prinsloo said in his judgment: “There is no provision in the new act or regulations, so it was pointed out, to cater for the position of an unsuccessful applicant for renewal. Once a renewal application has been refused and the subsequent appeal turned down, the unsuccessful previous licence-holder will be in unlawful possession of the firearm and open to prosecution.”
This was patently unfair, and for that reason the judge ruled that the old licences would remain valid. That was four years ago and the state has taken no further action in this regard.
The director of the museum, who was recovering from eye surgery, was arrested, handcuffed and locked up overnight in a filthy cell
The state was given yet another black eye in March last year, when the Sunday Times published a leaked performance audit report on the quality of training provided to police officers. This revealed that of 157,704 police officers who underwent training to comply with the regulations of the Firearms Control Act, 27,329 failed proficiency tests, yet many still carried service weapons.
The report added that police officers were sent out to fight crime with weapons they could not use properly, leading to high risks for their colleagues and members of the community. It also stated that most of those who failed their proficiency tests were expected to carry weapons daily, and “there are still no proper policies and procedures in place regarding competency issues of Police Act members on operational duty”.
Nobody knows what the cost of the Firearms Control Act has been to South Africa, but it will be billions rather than millions of rands.
Firearm law expert Martin Hood of MJ Hood & Associates:
We all knew that we didn’t have the budget or the manpower to do this properly. The legislation was flawed, its implementation was imperfect and incomplete, and numerous members of the police, including very senior officers, saw opportunities for corruption.
‘A senior member of the Hawks told me they believe that delays were purposely created by the people administering the system to create opportunities for corruption – specifically in the field of temporary authorisations because they’re easier to approve and there’s less control over them in a corrupt system.
“It’s pervasive at every police station in every province as well as in the inner workings of the Central Firearms Registry itself. The conclusion I have come to is that the police now have less control over firearms than they had under the old legislation because of this.
“Part of the current investigation involves certain Chinese individuals allegedly being in possession of hundreds of blank signed permits. People use permits – issued by the CFR and valid for a year – to take possession of firearms, supposedly while licence applications are pending.
No licence is issued but when the permits expire, the guns are kept and nobody follows up.”
Keith Dyer, ex-handgun editor of Magnum magazine:
The police, after initially being very aggressive about enforcement of the FCA, soon found that many of the requirements were impractical for them, so they now ignore them. All firearms surrendered for whatever reason – mainly for amnesty or as a result of police intimidation – are supposed to be ballistically tested before destruction to see if they can be linked to unsolved crimes. This could obviously never happen because the ballistic laboratory is snowed under and has a backlog of current evidence to collate. So, what better way to rid yourself of a murder weapon than to hand it over for destruction?
“They also continually lie to the public – the CFR’s call centre still tells worried gun owners whose new licences have expired that they are illegally in possession, which is rubbish. Their old licenses are still valid!”
Advocate John Welch, ex-Deputy Attorney General of Transvaal, now a trustee of the South African Gunowners’ Association (SAGA):
We were hoping that after the teething problems with the FCA things had normalised and over the last two years I think most people were satisfied. In most cases they were courteously treated by the police and applications for relicensing were processed in a reasonable time – often quicker than the promised 90 days.
“When we heard last month that the minister had announced a commission to investigate the current situation we wondered what it was about. It came as a great surprise to hear that certain firearms dealers were mentioned and especially when allegations were made against some of the top members of the police and the Central Firearms Registry. The mere fact that there is an ongoing investigation doesn’t mean that the system must stop, though. It’s a public institution that renders a service to the taxpayer. I believe it’s very important that the committee or commission must carry on and do its job and I just hope it will invite representations so we can help reach a correct finding.”
Adele Kirsten, director of the anti-gun group, Gun Free South Africa
Our call is that there’s a mess at the CFR. The system’s not working and we need to get to the bottom of that. We think that stopping operations and allowing investigators to get into the firearms registry to look at everything is the only way.
“We can’t put a timeline on this because we don’t know how long it will take. In a nine-month period in 2011 when the minister indicated that the CFR had become more efficient, they issued just over a million licences in nine months, whereas before, they hadn’t been able to do that in five years. That raised red flags for us: was the system becoming more efficient or was it just about rubber-stamping and not doing background checks while chasing numbers?”
Anonymous gun owner:
The situation is now ridiculous. I have eight firearms but when I applied to relicense them back in 2005, I was told that I could only apply for four. I applied for the most valuable ones and the licences came through in 2008. The first new licence has already expired, and the CFR helpline tells me that I am now in illegal possession of it. The four cheaper weapons I didn’t apply for are still legitimate though. People who complied with the law in 2005 are now worse off than those who didn’t.”
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