Picture: A lecturer and researcher in Police Practice at the North West University (NWU), Cobus Steenkamp/Supplied
By STAFF REPORTER
30 June 2026 – A lecturer and researcher in Police Practice at the North West University (NWU), Cobus Steenkamp said on 30 June 2026, as South Africa prepares for widespread anti-illegal immigration protests, the South African Police Service (SAPS) will not stand alone. Steenkamp said the Fidelity Security Group — a private commercial enterprise — is set to deploy 35 000 operational personnel, seven helicopters and an undisclosed fleet of surveillance drones (the author’s view) to assist SAPS in managing the anticipated unrest.
He further said Fidelity, it should be noted, also maintains its own independent crime risk assessment capacity and operational intelligence infrastructure. Cobus Steenkamp added that it is, by any institutional measure, a capable organisation.
“This raises a question that should unsettle every South African citizen. When a private sector CEO becomes the operational “right hand” of the National Commissioner of Police, what does that reveal about the constitutional fitness of the state?
“Wahl Bartman, CEO of Fidelity ADT, will be not merely a “force multiplier” on 30 June. He will be, in practical and operational terms, the in situ national commissioner for the day. The constitutional mandate to ensure community safety — vested exclusively in the South African Police Service under Section 205 of the Constitution — will, on that day, be partially exercised by a company whose primary legal obligation is to its shareholders, not to the South African public,” he said.
Steenkamp said this is not an indictment of Fidelity. He said it is an indictment of a system that made Fidelity necessary.
“The privatisation of public safety in South Africa is not the result of a single policy failure. It has been a gradual process — a slow constitutional haemorrhage spanning three decades — in which the private security industry evolved from a supplementary service into a commercial powerhouse whose core product is the one thing the state is constitutionally obligated to provide for free: community safety.
“The consequence is stark and morally indefensible. Safety has become a commodity. Those who can afford it, buy it. Those who cannot, wait — and hope. A recent Democratic Alliance survey of 1 025 police stations found that 56% were not operationally available at the time of the audit,” said Steenkamp.
He said for the majority of South Africans who cannot afford armed response services, this is not a statistic — it is a daily lived reality. Steenkamp said it is the silence that follows a call that is never answered.
“How did we arrive here? The deterioration was not accidental. It follows a traceable pattern, visible across at least five compounding institutional failures.
There are five signals of a system in collapse, and below I will explain them with regard to the South African Police Service in more detail.
“The police-to-population ratio in South Africa stands at approximately 1:427. When measured against the registered private security workforce, the ratio of police to security personnel is 1:3. Synthesised, this produces a sobering figure: one security officer for every 142 civilians — a figure that holds only for those civilians who live in areas with paying clients.
“South Africa now has more than 2.7 million registered private security officers, compared to fewer than 150 000 SAPS members serving a population of 62 million. This is not a resourcing challenge. It is the architecture of a parallel justice system — one in which your level of protection is determined not by your citizenship, but by your credit card limit,” he said.
Steenkamp said as one organised crime expert with more than 30 years in law enforcement has observed: “If you live in a traditional township environment, or in an informal settlement, it is few and far between that you will see security patrols — because they do not have paying customers.”
He said the South African Constitution does not contain a means-test for safety, but the market does.
“Research consistently documents a sustained, multi-decade decline in community confidence in SAPS. Public satisfaction with the police has decreased by at least 8% over the past six years, with the most recent figures placing national satisfaction at approximately 54%. The reasons cited by survey respondents are institutional rather than incidental: officers who fail to respond on time, insufficient police visibility, and perceptions of widespread corruption and incompetence.
“This erosion of trust does not occur in a vacuum. It creates a marketing opportunity. Private security enterprises do not grow in spite of policing failures — they grow because of them, leveraging fear, institutional distrust, and the visible decline of policing competency as the engine of commercial expansion,” said Steenkamp.
The Guardian 