I have carried a firearm every day for 10 years. I served in the military. I sat on the community policing forum in Stellenbosch. So when a telecoms company proposes that a GPS gadget clipped to a weapon will solve the crisis of police firearms flooding South Africa’s criminal underworld, I don’t need a brochure to know it is selling a fantasy.
Gugu Lourie wrote a column in the Sunday Times that reads like a Vodacom investor presentation. The thesis: SAPS loses thousands of firearms every year, and the solution is to attach IoT tracking devices, manufactured by a Vodacom subsidiary, to every state-issued weapon. The product is called a Peacemaker.
More than 3,400 SAPS firearms were lost or stolen between 2019 and 2024. Only 559 were recovered. Of 170 weapons that vanished from police armouries, 16 were found. Twenty-nine thousand rounds of state ammunition disappeared in six months.
On this much, Lourie and I agree. Where we part company is on the nature of the problem. Lourie sees a technological gap. I see an institutional collapse. And one does not fix a collapsing institution by giving it a new gadget.
We are being asked to believe that an institution that cannot procure pistols without scandal will seamlessly roll out IoT tracking devices across its entire arsenal.
Peacemaker is a Picatinny rail attachment. The standard SAPS sidearm for decades has been the Vektor Z88, which does not have a Picatinny rail. SAPS has been transitioning to the Beretta Px4 Storm, but this procurement has been dogged by the same corruption that characterises everything else the police service touches.
The auditor-general found that SAPS’ irregular expenditure increased by 140% in the 2024/25 financial year alone. We are being asked to believe that an institution that cannot procure pistols without scandal will seamlessly roll out IoT tracking devices across its entire arsenal.
A tracker on the rail means the officer cannot mount a torch or laser sight. You are asking a police officer to choose between seeing in the dark and being tracked by his commander. And a Picatinny mount is held by a locking lever or thumbscrew, designed to be detachable.
“Tamper detection” means the system tells you someone removed the device. It does not prevent removal. The tracker reports its own detachment, at which point you know the firearm has been stolen. What you do not know is where it has gone.
Assume every SAPS firearm is fitted with a Peacemaker. You now have a centralised cloud platform tracking every armed police officer in real time. Lourie presents this as an unqualified good. It is a high-value intelligence target. Global IoT hacking runs at approximately 820,000 attacks daily. In a country where the head of crime intelligence has testified before parliament that “almost the entire Gauteng SAPS is working for the cartel”, the assumption that such a platform would remain secure is delusional.
Consider how police firearms actually disappear. The Institute for Security Studies has documented officers renting their service weapons to criminals. A former SAPS colonel, Christiaan Prinsloo, stole and sold approximately 2,000 firearms to Cape gangs, linked to over 1,000 murders and 1,400 attempted murders. This was corruption so systematic it amounted to state-sponsored arms dealing. The system can “flag unusual patterns”. Flag to whom? To the same command structures that presided over 3,400 lost firearms in five years?
Layering expensive technology onto a rotten foundation produces a more expensive rotten foundation
Lourie’s piece also mentions, almost as an afterthought, that “Peacemaker can also be used to track licensed firearms”. A quiet extension from state weapons to civilian weapons. The government’s own 2015 review described the Central Firearms Register as “technically collapsed, institutionally incoherent and incapable of maintaining accurate records”.
What Lourie is proposing is an unprecedented surveillance infrastructure over 1.8-million lawful citizens, administered by an institution that cannot keep its own weapons out of the hands of murderers.
The technology the SAPS actually needs is not a GPS chip. It is a functioning central firearms register. It is an internal affairs apparatus that investigates officers who steal and sell state weapons. It is a ballistics system that works. It is integrity testing of senior officers. It is the political will to act on what the system already knows.
South Africa does not lose 3,400 firearms in five years because it lacks tracking devices. It loses them because the institution entrusted with those weapons is complicit in their disappearance. Layering expensive technology onto a rotten foundation produces a more expensive rotten foundation. No amount of IoT connectivity will fix that.
• Flack is a strategic communications consultant based in South Africa. He has worked in communications for the firearms lobby in South Africa for 10 years.
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