This article was first published by Business Day on 16 October 2024
The National Lottery Commission is fast approaching its deadline of October 8th to finalise who will be running the licensed national lottery. The tendering process has been fraught with the usual underhanded cadre-deployment, corruption, indecent secrecy, and lack of transparent meandering that characterises government in South Africa.
A whole menagerie of ANC-connected organisations has put in their bids to take over the multibillion-rand enterprise, while South Africans have been left in the dark.
This corruption is nothing new. According to GroundUp, hundreds of millions of rands worth of stolen money has been uncovered since 2018; they claim this is just the tip of the iceberg. The National Lotteries Commission is a goldmine for the corrupt – as millions of South Africans flock to buy tickets with the slim hope of winning a fortune. Corrupt officials don’t like those odds, so they just steal whatever isn’t nailed to the floor.
It is clear that the National Lotteries Commission needs to reform how it chooses its partners and operators. It is dangerous for a country as corrupt as South Africa to have that much money sitting so close to greedy, dishonest hands. Centralising lotteries as a concept under the government has only served to maximise the potential corruption.
With current legislation under the Lotteries Act private lotteries are severely restricted; so much so that they do not exist as anything more than a tiny pastime at festivals. The total value of the prize may not exceed R10 000, total ticket sales are restricted, and the price of tickets may not exceed R10. On top of this, promotion and operation are heavily restricted.
The popularity of the National Lottery proves that there is a demand amongst South Africans for such a concept. But with the corruption endemic in the National Lottery, South Africans are likely funding corruption, rather than charity, development or sound investment.
Private lotteries need to be deregulated and allowed. Why should a private company, charity, or institution be denied participating in an enterprise that the government so far monopolises? Additional private lotteries, operated on a large scale, could help produce mass amounts of money for charity, community development, and just produce capital for businesses.
Grievances that lotteries enable gambling, and that gambling is bad, are not sufficient to deny the need for private lotteries.
Individuals who want to gamble are going to do so already. And making petty moral decisions on behalf of others on what constitutes gambling or not is just busy-body erosion of an individual’s freedom. The stock market is gambling. Applying to work at one business over another is gambling. Every decision we make is a form of gambling.
The lottery, and other forms of gambling, have published probabilities and risk-factors available to those willing to read them. It is not the fault of the institution and the industry that many people do not get informed.
Gambling itself, while it can be heavily damaging on individuals and families, is an inevitability. Like smokers, drug addicts and drinkers, gambling is a vice that people won’t quit. They’ll just engage in illicit forms of the industry that are far more dangerous, and far more likely to be rigged against them.
Rather, a trustworthy gambling industry needs to be maintained to allow those who want to gamble to take an informed risk with their money. The money they lose is then redistributed towards a business that then uses the money for a good cause. In the case of a hypothetical private lottery, the money could go towards charity. But even if the money is just going towards a profit-making business, this is still generating capital that goes into investing into businesses and growing the economy.
It is arbitrary and restrictive to restrict the establishment of private lotteries, especially while the government lottery is a mess of corruption. Deregulate private lotteries and allow society to reap the positive benefits of inevitable gambling, and we will see our economy grow, unemployment diminish and the country become the better for it.
