South Africa‘s National Gambling Board (NGB) has engaged foreign aides in the fight to curtail the proliferation of offshore gambling sites that have targeted South Africans in recent years.
Data from the National Assembly Portfolio Committee on Trade, Industry and Competition showed that turnover from regulated online gambling platforms generated R75 billion last year. Yet, an estimated R5 trillion was said to have slipped through to unlicensed channels.
During a recent parliamentary briefing, NGB’s acting CEO, Lungile Dukwana, reiterated the malaise unlicensed gambling breeds and beckoned on government authorities and licensing bodies where most of these offshore sites are domiciled for concerted effort towards it.
“We’re seeing that there are external operators in our space, and those are not licensed in South Africa, and that creates a challenge of its own because, in that specific instance, they are coming from the online casinos, and they are offered by other countries”, Dukwana said during the briefing.
“Those are licensed from, for example, Gibraltar, the Philippines and the UK, and Malta as well. Those have been the source of our main platforms in terms of the online gambling sites that we have actually seen.”
However, he noted that responses from some external bodies have been satisfying as they ramp up activities aimed at ensuring offshore jurisdictions do not operate any further in South Africa.
That being said, the NGB has also joined forces with a number of intelligence units; the department of communications, the independent communications authority of South Africa (Icasa) as well as the police to ensure the IP addresses of most of the offshore sites are blocked.
Lately, South Africa have seen the travails of incessant black market gambling really stretch the country’s economy to breaking point. Monies said to have been originally budgeted for groceries and other credible activities is now perceived to have rather flowed into betting.
“People are spending money in a black hole that could have been spent on food,” Pieter Engelbrecht, CEO of Africa’s largest grocery store and most successful food retailer, Shoprite, said about the daily consumer spending habits of South Africans.
But Dukwana has assured stakeholder plans are being made with the National Gambling Policy Council (NGPC), with special attention on iGaming.
“We have now written a report to the NGPC to have this matter deliberated on, especially around online gambling, the issues of bet exchanges, and historical loss tracing. Those aspects are the issues that are going to the NGPC next”, Dukwana said.
However, there is a general belief amongst parliamentary members that the board’s biggest shortcoming is the lack of enforcement capability and solid regulatory infrastructures, which has plagued the industry for far too long.
