South Africa’s Mass Shootings Reveal a Governance Gap, Not Just a Policing Failure

Between December 2025 and June 2026, South Africa’s Gauteng province endured a cluster of coordinated mass shootings that killed dozens of people and left more than seventy injured. Armed men struck an unlicensed shebeen inside a hostel at Saulsville, a township tavern in Bekkersdal, a minibus taxi on the R59 near Meyerton, and the Jumpers informal settlement at Cleveland, where more than ten gunmen were dropped off by a minibus and moved through the settlement for close to an hour. Provincial commentary put the toll at roughly fifty-eight dead across about ten mass casualty shootings, most of them in Gauteng. A new analysis published in Frontiers in Political Science argues that these attacks should not be read simply as evidence that policing has failed, but as the visible symptom of a deeper and more troubling condition: a governance system that leaves certain spaces effectively ungoverned.

The study, conducted by Dorcas Khosa of the Department of Criminology and Security Science at the University of South Africa, treats the cluster as an occasion for theory building rather than as a statistical sample. Using a structured comparison of four incidents selected against a stated threshold definition, Khosa asks what account of governance best explains the pattern of where the attacks happened, why they recurred, and how the state responded. The answer, she argues, lies not in any single institutional weakness but in the simultaneous attenuation of four kinds of authority at the same locations: regulatory, spatial, economic and intelligence. It is the conjunction of these attenuations, rather than any one of them, that produces the exposure on which coordinated attacks depend.

The venues themselves tell much of the story. Two of the four incidents occurred at unlicensed liquor outlets, premises the state has the statutory authority to license, inspect and close under the Gauteng Liquor Act of 2003 but does not effectively control. Police reported closing more than eleven thousand illegal taverns and making over eighteen thousand arrests for illegal liquor trading in a single six-month period, figures that describe a regime overwhelmed by an informal sector it cannot absorb rather than a successful enforcement campaign. South African research has long established an association between the density and trading hours of alcohol outlets and levels of interpersonal violence, making the regulatory gap a plausible contributor to exposure at these sites.

The firearms dimension compounds the failure. South Africa has a comparatively strict Firearms Control Act, yet the weapons recovered at several scenes, including AK-47 pattern rifles and nine-millimetre pistols, circulate in an illicit market the statute does not reach, replenished by theft, corruption in the chain of custody and cross-border trafficking. The case of a senior officer in the Gauteng firearm licence division who sold decommissioned police weapons into the gang economy over years, documented by crime analyst Mark Shaw, shows that the custody system inside the state itself can supply the illicit market. A regime that governs the licensed minority effectively while the illicit majority flows freely, Khosa argues, is regulating the wrong population.

Spatial governance forms the second domain of the diagnosis. The venues of the cluster, a hostel shebeen, a township tavern, an informal settlement and a taxi on a peri-urban road, all occupy the margins of formal urban administration. Informal settlements such as Jumpers lack formal addressing, reliable lighting, planned access routes and an effective municipal presence, making them partially illegible to the state, which cannot easily see, service or secure what it has not mapped. The assailants at Cleveland moved through the settlement for an hour in a space that afforded cover, multiple entrances and a low probability of timely response. Khosa is careful to note that legibility pursued as clearance would displace residents into equally illegible and equally exposed spaces, and she argues instead for upgrading in place, which serves both the resident’s claim on services and the state’s capacity to respond.

The third domain is economic. Bekkersdal and Cleveland both lie amid the abandoned gold workings of the Witwatersrand, where informal miners known as zama zamas operate in and around disused shafts. Research establishes that illegal mining in South Africa is organised, territorial and unusually violent by continental standards, diverting output estimated well in excess of fourteen billion rand a year and drawing migrant labour from Lesotho, Mozambique and Zimbabwe into its most exposed positions. At Meyerton both the victims and the suspects were Lesotho nationals, an observation about how the violence is embedded in transnational networks of labour, contraband and firearms rather than an argument about migration as a cause of crime, a claim the study explicitly examines and rejects. Where an extractive rent is available and lawful economic access to it is absent, territorial control passes to armed actors and disputes are settled by force.

The fourth domain concerns the security apparatus itself. The deficit here is specific: not a shortage of investigative competence, since suspects were identified and arrested in several cases, including eleven arrests within days at Bekkersdal, but the near-total absence of preventive intelligence. Coordinated attacks on known high-risk premises, in areas known to be contested by armed illicit economies, recurred without apparent interruption. Khosa formalises this as a reactive equilibrium: a security apparatus whose capability is concentrated after the event lowers the perceived probability of interruption, which lowers the expected cost of a coordinated attack and sustains recurrence. The signature of the attacks, assailants arriving and departing in vehicles and moving through a space in a sustained sweep, is consistent with an expectation of impunity.

Against this diagnosis, Khosa tests nine rival explanations, from under-policing and firearm availability to organised criminal competition, gang dynamics, prosecutorial attrition, state capture, migration, structural violence and contagion. Each accounts for part of the picture, she finds, but none explains siting, recurrence and the asymmetry between investigative success and preventive failure within a single account. The governance framework she develops, drawing on human security, nodal and polycentric governance and the security-development nexus, is organised around four principles: integration, prevention, inclusion and development. It is anchored in Sustainable Development Goal 16, which commits states to reduce violence and promote effective institutions, converting safety outcomes into development targets that are budgeted, tracked and publicly reported.

The framework’s central implication is its most provocative claim: accountability assigned by function will continue to leave the interstice ungoverned, because every authority can discharge its own mandate in full while the composite risk remains unowned. The institutional innovation the cluster demands, Khosa argues, is a governing node accountable for the space itself, such as a statutory Provincial Safety Governance Council with binding authority over police command, liquor licensing, municipalities, mining and home affairs functions. She proposes a sequenced programme: within twelve months, convening the council and auditing the police firearm chain of custody; within one to two years, statutory data-sharing obligations and a graduated liquor compliance pathway; over three to ten years, settlement upgrading at scale and regulation of small-scale mining.

Khosa is candid about the limits of her argument. The framework was built from four incidents in one province over twelve months, selected because the outcome occurred, and it has not been tested against comparable spaces where no attack followed. Its propositions are claims about a mechanism rather than findings about its strength, and she calls for a case-control study of incident and matched non-incident sites paired with interviews establishing what risk information existed before each attack. Yet the lesson she draws is specific enough to state without that work. The attacks occurred where four kinds of authority thinned out at once, and reactive intensification does not reach that condition, because force applied after the event operates on the consequences of interstitial exposure while leaving its production untouched. For unequal, rapidly urbanising societies across the global South, the decisive question is not how much security the state can supply but how well it can govern the margins where formal authority thins out. The alternative, she concludes, is to keep arriving after the shooting has stopped.

Subject of Research: Governance failures behind recurrent mass shootings in Gauteng, South Africa, and a proposed developmental security framework

Article Title: Recurrent mass shootings and the governance of insecurity in South Africa: towards a developmental security framework

Article References: Khosa, D. (2026). Recurrent mass shootings and the governance of insecurity in South Africa: towards a developmental security framework. Frontiers in Political Science, 8, Article 1929165. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2026.1929165

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fpos.2026.1929165

Keywords: South Africa, mass shootings, security governance, Gauteng, illegal mining, SDG 16, developmental security, crime prevention, Recurrent, mass, shootings, governance