National Lotteries Commission to appeal lottery judgment
The board of the National Lotteries Commission (NLC) has resolved to appeal the judgment which ordered trade, industry and competition minister Parks Tau to determine the successful applicant for the fourth national lottery licence by no later than May 28.
The judgment, passed by the Pretoria High Court on Wednesday, also ordered the minister to negotiate a licence agreement with the successful fourth licensee by no later than May 28. It declared as unlawful and invalid the minister's decision to extend the bid validity period for the fourth national lottery licence by an additional 12 months, until May 31 2026.
The court also declared the minister's issuance of the request for proposal (RFP) to operate a temporary national lottery licence (from June 1) as unconstitutional and set it aside. However, judge Sulet Potterill suspended this order for five months for the fourth licensee to take over the operation of the national lottery.
She said it was a just and equitable remedy to set aside the temporary licence RFP, but to suspend that order for five months to enable the continuation of the national lottery.
'I am unconvinced that the period of 12 months argued for is necessary,' Potterill said.
Speaking to Newzroom Afrika on Thursday, NLC chair Barney Pityana said it was appealing the judgment and was contesting the five-month period for the new licensee to take over the lottery, as ordered by the judge.
'We are contesting that. We think the judge probably misunderstood the scope of what it takes to set up a process from the beginning. Strictly speaking, if we go along with what the judge says, everything that has been done is simply going to fall away.
'The good news is that the minister expects to be able finalise the licence for the operation of the lottery by May 28.'
Pityana said the NLC was appealing the judgment in the way it was formulated.
'It makes it impossible to do even what the judge herself felt was in the public interest to do.'
Pityana said it was impossible for a new operator to take over the operation of the national lottery in five months. At the very least it could be done in 12 months, he said.
'The board has resolved to appeal the judgment because the way it is, it is an impossible judgment to execute even that which the judge sought to help us to do.'
TimesLIVE
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Mail & Guardian
an hour ago
- Mail & Guardian
Open letter to Thabo Mbeki on the crisis in the DRC
Former president Thabo Mbeki. Your Excellency Thabo Mbeki, It is never easy to address publicly a figure of your stature, former president of the Republic of South Africa, architect of the New Economic Partnership for African Development (Nepad) and moral heir to the pan-African struggle of Nelson Mandela. Your life's journey stands as a testament to the historical fight for the dignity of African peoples, the sovereignty of African states and a vision of peace grounded in justice. Precisely because of this extraordinary legacy and the moral authority you represent, your recent remarks in Tanzania, which have been perceived as an implicit endorsement of former president Joseph Kabila's narrative on the crisis in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, have caused deep concern. These statements urgently call for clarification historically, politically and morally, given the responsibilities that come with preserving regional stability. At a time when some manipulate pan-African ideals to legitimise subversive agendas, it is imperative that respected voices on the continent demonstrate strategic discernment and ethical coherence. In a nation at war, words carry weight. They are never neutral. Spoken by a continental authority figure, each word becomes a weapon in the information battlefield. Speech often precedes action. It guides, legitimises and sometimes triggers conflict. What you recently expressed goes beyond neutral commentary. It carries the tone of pre-hostile rhetoric laced with accusatory language, ethnic insinuation and indirect justification of violence. This was not a neutral political analysis. It laid the foundation for a latent casus belli , activating well-known levers in the playbook of information warfare: • Emotional mobilisation through references to ethnic exclusion; • The implicit identification of a Congolese political actor as an obstacle to peace; and • The suggestion that violence may be legitimate when carried out by a 'frustrated' or 'ignored' people. As an expert on regional dynamics, you know full well that such rhetoric in such a volatile context functions as a precursor to violent escalation. In this instance, your words resonate as a veiled forecast of conflict. Your statements reawaken unhealed wounds. The implicit and explicit references to the Luba people of Kasaï and Katangan communities evoke painful memories of the 1992–94 ethnic violence in Katanga, a tragedy many historians consider an attempted ethnic cleansing that displaced more than 800,000 Kasaïans. That violence was, in part, orchestrated by individuals now close to Joseph Kabila, including General John Numbi, currently a fugitive. Your speech risks legitimising a new spiral of tribal violence in a region already on edge. This is not merely a misreading of history, it is a grave political error, one that gives strategic momentum to armed destabilization agendas. What is most striking is the dissonance between the peaceful tone of your speech and its martial undercurrent. On the surface, you call for peace, dialogue and protection of certain communities. Yet beneath that, you echo albeit indirectly justifications often invoked by the M23 rebel group, backed by Rwanda. This dual posture — peace on the surface, mental preparation for war underneath — is a well known tactic in influence strategy. It rests on a simple principle: those who shout loudest against violence before a conflict often turn out to be its most active architects. This is not the legacy of Mandela. It is rather the rhetoric of geopolitical manipulation, where the suffering of Congolese Tutsi communities is exploited for strategic gain. While the concerns of these communities deserve recognition and justice, they cannot under any circumstances justify military aggression against a sovereign state. Excellency, in speaking as you did, you did not speak as a statesman working for continental peace, but as a discursive vector of a war project. Where we expected the voice of a Mandela disciple, we heard instead the voice of a factional tribune tacitly justifying the political overthrow, or even elimination, of a sitting, democratically elected president. At this point in your journey, your moral and political responsibility demands that you weigh every word with the precision of a continental mediator. Today, words can kill literally. It bears repeating, a single word voiced in the press in Dar es Salaam or Johannesburg today can reverberate with tangible consequences in Goma or Kinshasa. Pan-Africanism is not symbolic solidarity or a shared colonial memory. It is built on cooperation between sovereign states, equality among peoples, justice, peace and mutual respect. The role of a pan-African elder is not to choose sides in an armed conflict, but to serve as a moral and diplomatic compass. But what we heard in Tanzania was not a voice of peace. It was a factional narrative, a coded endorsement of destabilization, potentially aimed at a sitting head of state. Let us be clear: the current crisis in eastern DRC is neither a mere governance failure nor a case of 'ethnic marginalisation' . It is a transnational hybrid war disguised as a rebellion, in which the M23 plays the dual role of armed proxy and political facade for Kigali's ambitions. By publicly endorsing Kabila's concerns without simultaneously condemning M23's atrocities you strengthen this hybrid strategy. You grant political credibility to a movement responsible for thousands of deaths and more than seven million displaced people. Even worse, your statements help invert the narrative: any criticism of the rebellion is now recast as ethnic hatred, while the rebellion itself is framed as a legitimate 'popular aspiration'. This manipulation erodes Congolese sovereignty and seriously jeopardises any hope for sustainable peace. Excellency, Africa is entering a new era of hybrid conflicts fueled by identity-based frustration, economic rivalries and manipulated narratives. In this context, our leaders must be more vigilant than ever. The Great Lakes region does not need rhetoricians of conflict disguised as diplomats. It does not need moral sponsors of violence. It needs peace, truth, justice and reconciliation. It needs bridge-builders not grave-diggers. We solemnly urge you to clarify your statements, to denounce all rhetoric of war, and to reclaim your rightful place among Africa's peacemakers. The world is watching. So is History. Respectfully, Roger B Bope Roger B Bope is a security analyst and strategist.
Mail & Guardian
an hour ago
- Mail & Guardian
We must all reclaim our information space
Elon Musk. (File photo) More South Africans arrived in the United States this week. But it is an old resident who made the most headlines. Elon has left the Doge office. He did so in bizarre pomp and ceremony, with Donald Trump looking to save both their faces with a predictably awkward golden key award ceremony. Musk and his Javier Milei-inspired chainsaw are no longer a factor in Washington. The same cannot be said for public life. Musk owns X/Twitter, one of the biggest social media platforms on the planet. He's had a huge following on it long before he took control in 2022. He relishes using that influence to peddle all manner of absurdity and falsity. Musk has been the figurehead of the open conspiracy of tech oligarchs that reign in the White House. They have made no secret of their willingness to do whatever is asked of them, knowing that the reciprocation will be ample (or indeed, the punitive repercussions for a failure to toe the line would be grave.) Meta owner Mark Zuckerberg's sycophantic about-turn on moderation was a perfect example of that reality playing out in real time. In that now infamous announcement video, he waxed lyrical about how he created Facebook to be a democratic marketplace of free ideas. That is a lie, of course. He created Facebook so college boys could rate women on the internet. Regardless, with other media and search engine owners included in the cohort, the fact remains that a few powerful men control the dominant means of creating and sharing information in 2025. Those white South Africans arriving as refugees in the US should be all the reminder we need of how pernicious a narrative can be; and that real-world consequences need not be grounded in truth or rational reasoning. It bears repeating: there is no white genocide in South Africa. It is imperative that we, as individual news consumers and practitioners, reclaim our information space. For as much as the oligarchs strut with the swagger of impunity, that is far from the case. While this would be an obvious segue into launching into a pitch to get you to subscribe, the struggle we face goes beyond promoting ideas of established media. There's a war going on for our attention. The mistake would be in thinking we have to take sides. We have to respect each other and the process of sharing ideas civilly, with a respect for the truth. If our engagement begins and ends with a retweet, our society will begin to look even bleaker. The algorithm only wins if you surrender to it.
Mail & Guardian
2 hours ago
- Mail & Guardian
Let's fall back in love with journalism
We do what we do because of you. I desperately needed to hear those words when they were written by Sipho Kings after being appointed Mail & Guardian editor in 2020. The world had turned upside down a few months earlier. In March, we turned off the office lights as the Covid-19 lockdown set in, uncertain of what was to become of our society, let alone our publication. Not long after that we lost key staff, including our editors. The M&G under editor-in-chief Khadija Patel and deputy editor Beauregard Tromp had been a glorious place to work. We produced agenda-setting journalism. But more than that it was steered by a distinctly humanist outlook: both in the agency we had to craft our stories and the people-first approach we had to them. Advertising disappeared overnight in the pandemic. The unbreakable habits of newspaper readers were broken, never to return. A media career seemed a terrible prospect. Sipho's words were a reminder of how backwards that perspective was. Journalism is more than the clichéd calling. It is a relationship with those that you serve. We have made a promise to you to operate with integrity and honesty. And in return you continue to support our work. Knowing that you have given us a mandate to do what we do makes it a lot easier to get up in the morning. Coincidentally, it is now exactly five years later that I hope those words will once more bring some small solace to my colleagues. You have probably seen the news that the M&G has entered into a retrenchment process. We don't know the scale of restructuring yet, but these are invariably awful affairs. The uncertainty is debilitating. Somehow, in the middle of all of this, the team is still pushing out a quality product every day and week — something that fills me with pride and gratitude. Above any intellectual ruminating about the profession is the cold fact that livelihoods are on the line. The people behind the bylines and editing desks do not deserve this. For all the diverse personalities that have walked through its doors over the years, the M&G has had a magical quality of attracting similar sets of bright characteristics. An M&G journalist is curious, intelligent, acerbic with their pen, sceptical and just a little mischievous. Above all they are fiercely loyal. There are scrupulous veterans in the newsroom who remember the paper's beginning, making their association with the brand longer than many of the rest of us have been alive. Those first days were in 1985, when Anton Harber and Irwin Manoim founded the Weekly Mail at a critical point in South Africa's history. Reminders of the M&G's role in democracy are hung up around the office in blown-up front covers. They are not just old newspapers but key moments over the last four decades. Nelson Mandela walking free with his fist in the air; an optimistic nation's first vote; the passing of icons such as Miriam Makeba and Brenda Fassie; former president Jacob Zuma's tumultuous presidency and ultimate imprisonment. A staff favourite comes from June 1986. 'Our lawyers tell us we can say almost nothing critical about the emergency,' it reads, before practically winking, 'But we'll try.' On the opposite wall is Zuma's then-spindoctor Mac Maharaj with 'Censored' taped over it. That lead story had to be pulled in 2011 at the last minute after the journalists working on it were threatened with criminal prosecution. Those two images, crafted 25 years apart, say everything about the M&G. The paper has not wavered in its mission to hold the powerful to account, no matter who sits in the seat of influence. And it will take more than a legal letter and abuse of that power to deflate our stubbornness and commitment to readers. Today's threat is very different. There are any number of reasons global media is struggling, and has been for some time. Some are of a more nefarious nature (algorithms that hold you attention span at gunpoint, for instance) and a fall in advertising and subscriptions. Others are simply inevitabilities of changing times. But there is one fundamental truth that will never change: we do what we do because of you. Your support is as valuable today as it was in 2020. As it was in 1985. We would be remiss not to use our platform to ask you for support. Taking out a subscription, if you don't have one already, would mean everything to us. If you're unable to do that then we ask you to merely share our story — online or with anyone who would listen. My appeal is broader than just asking for your backing. There have been more than a few cheers since the retrenchment news broke last week. That can be expected, but the scale of the schadenfreude has taken us aback. It is clear that trust for legacy media institutions is at an all-time low. The M&G is not immune to criticism. We have made many mistakes over the years. What we can be unequivocal about, however, is that a blow to anyone in the news media is a gut punch to all of us. That goes for all of our colleagues in the industry who have faced job losses and closure in recent years and to people outside of the media. Our society thrives when it has as many voices as possible; when dedicated people are given a good livelihood to give their time to their craft. Progress is a beautiful thing, but there is still a need, and space, for the dogged values of trustworthy journalism. My ask to you is that you give a second look to the woman at the robot selling Sunday newspapers; pause for a second at the newsstand as you rush out of the shops; make sure you go back to that op-ed online you promised yourself you'd read; explore the blogs, podcasts and web shows emerging from fantastic young journalists. Try to imagine the immense machinery at work behind the scenes in all these cases. Talk about it with somebody else. South African society is a mishmash of backgrounds. An inclusive knowledge economy is how we sow strength in diversity, instead of division. When we pass around a newspaper on the bus, laugh about something funny we read in the office, or share an article we found interesting in a family chat group, we become united in our experiences and our stories get a little closer to one another. Let's fall back in love with journalism. Together. Subscribe at
