South Africa’s security shift: When private guards replace the State

This article was first published by The Common Sense.In this analysis The Common Sense tracked three decades of South African Police Service (SAPS), South African National Defence Force (SANDF), and Private Security Industry Regulatory Authority (PSiRA) staffing data, together with 27 years of Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) polling on trust in the police. The Common Sense used the ratio of private security personnel to police officers to highlight an aspect of South Africa’s enclavisation phenomenon: the reorganisation of South African life around private systems that do what the state no longer can..By Warwick Grey.The chart below tracks police officers and registered active private security officers per 100 000 people for every year from 1997 to 2025. In 1997, the two forces stood at near parity: 272 sworn police officers per 100 000 people against 285 private security officers. From there the lines part company. Police strength has drifted between roughly 230 and 310 per 100 000 for the entire period and stands at 237 today. The ratio of private security officers has climbed almost without interruption, from 285 per 100 000 in 1997 to 965 today..The next chart distils the same data into a single line: the number of private security officers for every one police officer, year by year, between 1997 and 2025..The significance of that number is best understood against the classical definition of a state. The state is defined by its monopoly on the legitimate use of force, exercised through the police and the army. In South Africa that monopoly now exists mostly on paper. The SAPS fields roughly 148 000 sworn police officers. The SANDF fields roughly 69 000 uniformed members, a force that has itself shrunk by more than a fifth since the late 1990s. Together they muster about 217 000 people. PSiRA's registers list 608 977 active private security officers.The private industry therefore deploys more than double the combined workforce of the police and the defence force, as shown in the graphic below..That is what enclavisation looks like in practice. It is the process by which South African communities and firms build private, self-sufficient systems to replace failing public ones: their own security, power, water, and schooling, prospering inside the enclave while the public realm decays outside it.The final chart plots the share of adults who tell the HSRC they trust the police against the number of private security officers per 100 000 people. The two lines are close to mirror images of each other: as confidence in the police has fallen, the private security officers’ line has increased, without a single sustained reversal in either. Trust in police fell sharply after the Marikana killings of August 2012, when police shot and killed 34 striking mineworkers..The HSRC has measured confidence in the police since 1998. Trust peaked at 47% in 1999. It held around 40% through the 2000s, broke sharply after Marikana in 2012, fell again after the July 2021 unrest, and has sat at 22% since 2022, the lowest readings in 27 years of surveying. Over the same period the number of private security officers per 100 000 people more than tripled..Read more:.South Africans go off-grid as state fails to deliver basic services.Given the revelations at the Madlanga Commission and given the state’s approach to corruption and reform broadly there is little reason to think that the trajectory will be reversed, meaning that privatisation of security services will remain a key driver of enclavisation of the future of South Africa..This article was first published by The Common Sense and is republished with permission..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox every morning on weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa's bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here.

South Africa’s security shift: When private guards replace the State

Related Stories

David Ansara: As DIRCO crumbles, civil society steps in

No plaster can heal South Africa's anti-immigration wound

Black South Africans own two-thirds of the JSE — the numbers race nationalists ignore

SA's quiet break-up: Why the enclave economy is now the most important investment thesis in the country