What Exactly Is Licensed
The majority of these licenses are for two things : venues that have Limited Payout Machines, and sportsbooks. Here’s a rough breakdown of the numbers by province:
- Gauteng managed to dish out 753 licenses;
- KwaZulu-Natal handed out 596;
- The Western Cape gave 549 a go.
The remaining provinces shared out what was left.
South Africa doesn’t have a centralised system for issuing licenses. Each of the nine provinces does its own thing, through its own regulator.
What Worries Lawmakers
Gana got in touch with Parks Tau, the Minister for Trade, Industry, and Competition, to have a chat with him about this. It turns out that the betting market in South Africa is growing at an incredibly fast rate – fast enough that it’s left him a bit gobsmacked. Apparently we now have over 400 registered bookmakers in the country, which is double the number in Australia, five times the number in Brazil, and a whopping 15 times the number in Denmark.
The fact is that Ghana isn’t particularly concerned about the issue of issuing licences. His worry is that the provincial regulators just don’t have the resources to keep an eye on all these new operators. He’s talking about things like making sure that consumers are being looked after, and that bookies are following the rules about responsible gaming and keeping track of their books. The problem is, the provinces that do the regulating all have pretty different levels of resources, which just adds to the problem.
Some Numbers from the Police
Another MP from Rise Mzansi, Songezo Zibi, had a go at asking the Minister of Police for some data on the state of things. He’d asked about the number of cases of illegal gambling, and the answer he got from SAPS was that there had been over 32,000 of them recorded over the past five years. Only 36 of those were from the online sector, which is hardly surprising given that most of these cases are from the old-school, in-person kind of gambling.
Over the last five years, the police have only managed to nick 39 people for online gambling, and just 22 of them actually got convicted. The police are having a bit of a problem with this stuff, they say that online bookies are always popping up and shutting down again, making it hard for them to keep track of who’s who. They also believe that many of these operators are registered in Curaçao.
Broader Context
According to figures from the National Gambling Commission and the parliamentary trade committee, the South African gambling industry’s revenue for the last financial year stood at 75 billion rand, equivalent to approximately 4.3 billion dollars. The total turnover across all market segments reached 1.5 trillion rand.
However, online casinos remain banned in the country. Online betting is permitted only on sports and horse racing. A bill to regulate interactive gaming has been under discussion for many years, but has yet to reach a final vote.
Against this backdrop, the combination of rapid licensing growth and the limited capabilities of provincial regulators poses a persistent structural risk. The market is growing, but there is no oversight.
