Newsletters

NHSA Newsletter

VOL. 17 (32) - 30-08-2021

SAPS (CFR): OUTSTANDING LICENCE APPLICATION EVALUATIONS

Landbou.com yesterday reported the following figures for outstanding licence and competency applications at CFR.  These figures were reported to the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee for Police by Genl. Mamotheti (Head of FLASH) at a recent meeting of the Portfolio Committee.

Applications in First amnesty (1 December 2019 to 31 May 2020) – 29,758 new licence applications received, finalised 14,899 (50,1% completed)

Applications in Second amnesty (1 August 2020 to 31 January 2021) – 75,363 new licence applications received, finalised 4,241(5,6% completed)

Outstanding "ordinary" new applications total 341,134, which includes 188,296 competency applications to still be evaluated

For renewal of firearms business applications there are still 14,930 applications to be evaluated.

Of the 165,715 firearms handed in with SAPS during the two recent amnesties, 105,121 (63,4%) were for new licence applications, while 60,594 (36,6%) firearms were handed in for destruction.

Of the 60,594 firearms handed in for destruction, 20,439 (33,7%) have been destroyed.

This should give members an indication as to why their applications are taking so long to be finalised.  It seems CFR is approximately 8 to 12 months behind with all applications.

This is just not good enough.  Despite the Portfolio Committee’s “bark” no real changes to this situation are expected in the immediate future as the Portfolio Committee and the SAPS General Staff have not one put mechanisms in place to ascertain that the bad state of affairs reported above, will be managed by appointing more staff to CFR.

Nothing in the above, reports anything about the generally bad service delivery experienced at so many police stations where DFOs each seemingly has an own set of rules to accept and forward applications to CFR.  It must be said that there are still stations where good service is experienced.  Unfortunately, it seems they are few in number and that expected service delivery is highly dependent on the attitude of the specific DFO and his/her staff.

The situation with lack of evaluating applications as stated above, is the single most important reason why members should renew their firearm licences on time.  Please do not disarm yourselves.  Register your firearms on your Natshoot Portal so that the system can warn you 150 days and again 120 days before the licence expiry date.

Kind Regards

Natshoot Office

This Newsletter circulated to all members via Email on 27-07-2021