Project: Gaming the Lottery

The research mirrors studies from the United States and Europe that suggest lotteries can amount to a regressive tax. In the U.S., where lottery tickets are heavily taxed, state-run lottery revenues often exceed corporate income taxes. In South Africa, the poor are sold on “a dream” that, in the words of the National Gambling Board, which oversees the country’s gambling industry, is “consciously and perhaps irresponsibly manipulated” by the national lottery’s aggressive advertising. Some of the revenue fills government coffers. But the companies involved get an arguably bigger jackpot: As of 2014, the global lottery industry was worth roughly $300 billion. This gamble, though, may in fact be a swindle. While lotteries function essentially as a tax on poor citizens, some of the big companies that dominate the industry engage in aggressive tax avoidance to ensure they pay very little. GTech, a U.S.-based lottery titan that operates jackpots in 100 countries, has been the subject of controversies stretching back decades.

The lottery in South Africa is hugely supported by poor and low income earners, with 73% of players earning less than R5,000 a month – and of those 33% earn R1,000 a month or less.

When the South African Lottery was launched in South Africa in March 2000 it outlawed most other lotteries games and scratch cards, which badly affected some non-profit organisations that were using these types of games for fund raising.

If the global lottery industry is a living organism, a strong argument can be made that its nerve center is Basel, Switzerland.

Though more than 75% of South Africans surveyed by the NGB played the lottery, unlike other forms of gambling, the purpose was not recreational but an attempt to change life circumstances.

Few activities are more deeply ingrained into daily life in many countries around the world than purchasing a lottery ticket.

Memo calls on Ebrahim Patel not to suspend the National Lottery Commission’s board