You would expect the driver of a cash-transporting truck to be a big, robust guy, but Elijah Gumbi is thin and old for his 42 years. He limps, dragging his heavy security guard’s boots across the tiles at Coin Security’s offices in Centurion.
Softly spoken and everybody’s pal, Gumbi looks as if he wouldn’t hurt a fly. At Coin Security’s Pretoria branch, however, he is the longest-serving and most trusted driver.
This week he spoke frankly of his hair-raising experiences and displayed the scars from bullets fired by robbers.
Gumbi started working for Coin Security in 1982 after his teaching ambitions were shattered by school boycotts and student violence.
His chosen profession proved far more dangerous, requiring ”courage, determination, lots of energy” — and constant vigilance. But he insists he has never regretted the move.
Gumbi is grateful that in his 23 years on the job he has been involved in only three cash-in-transit heists, and has lived to tell the story.
His first heist came eight years after he first took the steering wheel of a cash vehicle. His crew members had informed thugs in Soshanguve, outside Pretoria, that his truck would pick up money at a large township retailer. ”Somehow the police arrived,” shooting the robbers and one of his crew in the process.
A crew member who had conspired with the heisters only escaped the same fate by grabbing a passing child and using her as a human shield. ”If he hadn’t picked up the girl, I would have finished him myself,” Gumbi said.
The real crunch came in April last year in Pretoria when two BMW sedans packed with robbers wielding AK-47s and R5s smacked into his vehicle from different directions.
”Then there was a hail of bullets, but we sat still in the truck. The robbers finally opened fire at point-blank range with armour-piercing bullets. I was hit in the arm.” He was in and out of hospital for much of last year.
Gumbi explained that three crew members man each truck — a driver, who is not allowed to leave the car for security reasons, and two armed guards. Given that more than 10 robbers are usually involved in heists, he argues that the limited number of crew members is a major flaw.
It is the guards who are generally targeted by criminals when heists are hatched from the inside, Gumbi said, drivers were usually not drawn in.
Apart from timed collisions with heavy sedans, a common heist technique is to hold up guards when they are out of the vehicle. ”Robbers wait for our guards outside shopping malls and, out of the crowd, approach them and put a gun to their backs,” he said.