Acting police minister Firoz Cachalia has told Parliament he cannot commit to any deadline for rolling out body-worn cameras to SAPS officers, because the tender has not been concluded.

In a written reply to DA MP Mzamo Billy, Cachalia said procurement remains in the contracting phase and the bid is still to be advertised. Body cameras were first proposed for the service in 2019, and the ministry committed in 2024 to begin deployment in the 2025/26 financial year.

R14 million was allocated in 2025/26 for body-worn and dashboard cameras nationally, and none of it has been spent. The plan presented at the police budget vote covered 450 body cameras and 200 dash cameras for the entire country.

Former minister Senzo Mchunu put the cost of a single unit at roughly R28,818, which is where R14-million goes. SAPS asked SITA for permission to advertise the tender independently, was refused, and the process was handed to SITA for technical refinement and compliance. It still has not been advertised.

The City of Cape Town, meanwhile, rolled out thousands of body cameras to its own officers by April. Cachalia also confirmed that timelines for digital evidence management systems across the provinces remain unconfirmed, which is the larger software problem sitting behind the hardware.

MyBroadband reported the parliamentary reply and quoted UNISA's Professor Mpho Matlala attributing the delay to poor planning and probable budget constraints. News24 documented Cape Town's metro rollout running years ahead of the national service. IOL reported that SITA's refusal to let SAPS advertise the bid independently is what pushed the process back.

Strip out the politics and this is a procurement story with a traceable cause. SAPS asked to run its own tender, SITA said no, and the bid has sat unadvertised since.

Anyone selling technology into the South African state should read that sequence closely, because it is not unique to policing and it predicts your sales cycle better than any budget line.

Note what R28,818 a unit actually buys. That is not a camera. It is a camera plus cloud evidence storage, chain of custody and a support contract, which is why the software timelines matter more than the hardware.

Cape Town proved a metro can buy all of this inside a year. The gap here is procurement capability, not technology, and no tender fixes that.

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