After the Bell: Why we shouldn't have a national lottery

Daily Maverick

6 days ago

The main reason we have a national lottery in the first place is that it is supposed to be a good way to finance public goods, a way of getting money to finance things our society should have. But we know that this did not happen while the previous board of the National Lotteries Commission was in charge. Instead, they spent it on their friends and, in some cases, themselves.
Sometimes something becomes so much a fact of life that it is easy to forget to question it. I was thinking about that yesterday when the Stock Exchange News Service published an update from Goldrush.
It has, quite literally, won the National Lottery.
Sizekhaya has been awarded the licence to operate the Fourth National Lottery and Sports Pools for South Africa for eight years, with the licence kicking in on or before 1 June next year. Goldrush is a 50% shareholder in Sizekhaya.
Sizekhaya, the official name of the consortium, will make a huge amount of money as a result.
The entire company, and those who own it, will change dramatically now.
At the same time, given that the stakes involved are so high, it was always inevitable that the losing bidder would go to court. And while Ithuba, the former operator, has not said it will do that yet, it has muttered about consulting its legal team on the decision.
I do wonder if the minister who had to make this decision – Parks Tau at the Department of Trade, Industry and Competition – might regret one part of his public statement on this. He suggested that it was a 'difficult' decision. At some point, one of the parties might well ask for the record of the decision, and ask him what made it quite so difficult.
Considering that the smell of politics was around this entire process almost from the beginning, he might well be asked if it was technically difficult, or politically difficult.
But I think this obscures a much more important question.
I don't think we should have a national lottery. I think it does us harm as a society.
Firstly, so many people spend so much money on it and receive nothing in return.
Let me be clear, the chances of winning the main payout are literally nothing.
Not mathematically nothing. One in over 20 million to be more precise.
But in real life, that's nothing.
And look at who is losing their money; so often it's people who desperately need all the money they have.
Funnily enough, even most of the people who do win actually don't end up having better lives as a result. Both here and in places such as the UK, the stories of people who win the lottery involve the end of marriages, families and, in some cases, whole communities.
The main reason we have a national lottery in the first place is that it is supposed to be a good way to finance public goods, a way of getting money to finance things our society should have.
But thanks to the incredibly courageous journalism of Raymond Joseph (who has won multiple awards for his work), we know that this did not happen while the previous board of the National Lotteries Commission was in charge.
Instead, they spent it on their friends and, in some cases, themselves.
The first bad sign was when the National Lotteries Commission decided that instead of people applying for lottery funding, they would literally go and find organisations and give them money. You don't need a picture book to know what happened next.
And it was so brazen. I remember asking the Chief Operating Officer at the time, Philemon Ledwaba, how he could justify his organisation giving money to a group run by his wife. It was on live TV. And he showed a complete lack of conscience about it.
It was literally extraordinary.
Now, I'm sure defenders of the national lottery will say safeguards can be put in place to stop this from happening again. And no one can say anything negative about the people who currently run the National Lotteries Commission, they're top people and they're trying to clean it up.
But the chances of it happening again are, I would suggest, a lot higher than one in 20 million. In fact, given what happens around us so often, I would almost put money on it happening again in the next 15 years.
However, I don't think that's the strongest argument against a lottery. I think the strongest argument against it is that it legitimises gambling.
Now, I'm lucky, gambling has no interest for me. Once, Sun City gave me some gambling chips as a teenager — they could only be used in the casino and could not be exchanged directly for cash.
Being boring, I didn't gamble with them. Instead, I put half on the red and half on the black at the (non-Russian) roulette table.
That meant I ended up with what I started with. But in chips that could be exchanged for cash, and off I went.
I know for some people, I think many people, it's not like that. They love gambling, the thrill of it, the (mathematically tiny) chance that their lives could suddenly change.
We are seeing this happening now in the incredible rise of online gambling.
I have no doubt that this will lead to more poverty, the ruin of more families and, even perhaps, some awful suicides.