Lotto red flag: one way or another, the state will get that ‘tax' bump
It still might be a few more years until the South African government takes over the running of the lottery, but at least we can guess its new slogan already: Tata ma chance, ta-ta ma billions.
According to the Sunday Times, Sizekhaya Holdings, tapped to take over from Ithuba, is likely to be the last private company to oversee the continued transfer of money from the very poor to the increasingly rich, with plans afoot to see the lottery handed over to the state once Sizekhaya's turn at the trough comes to an end.
Once this handover happens, Sizekhaya board chairperson Moses Tembe explained, the new government-run lottery would look something like current lotteries in China, where, in a rare nod to actual communism, the Chinese Communist Party controls the means of production, or at least the means of producing gambling addicts.
To be fair, not all lottery players in South Africa are addicts being deliberately preyed upon by cynical millionaires: most are just desperately poor people being deliberately preyed upon by cynical millionaires.
Still, you can understand why our Government of National Unity should be so keen to get its hands on this gigantic money-printing machine, not least because so much of that money comes without immediate political cost.
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