SOUTH Africa is having second thoughts about legalised gambling, with the poor spending their last coins on dreams of instant wealth.
“I wonder whether it is not time to have another look at our policies on gambling, especially casinos,” Social Development Minister Zola Skweyiya told parliament earlier this month, a call that has won backing from churches and other groups.
Money that should have been spent on food, or to build stable families, was going on gambling, and gambling parents were leaving their children without care, he said.
Skweyiya has also expressed concern that a further 50_000 “one-armed bandits” are to be licensed soon, noting that even the poorest settlements would be able to have one.
The top prize in the national lottery, with R2.50 tickets, rolls over each week if it is not won, sometimes rising to R15m or more. Most people buy multiple tickets.
Peter Collins, director of the centre for the study of gambling at the University of Cape Town, estimates that about 60% of adults in Gauteng province, which takes in Johannesburg and Pretoria, gamble regularly. That is more than those who drink.
The poor, in a country where unemployment is around 30%, and the elderly, barely surviving on monthly pensions of around R550 are among those drawn to gambling by its promises of fortune.
“I rely on the money I win,” said pensioner Elizabeth Dippenaar, 73, playing high-tech slot machines at Johannesburg’s extravagant mock Tuscan Montecasino.
“If I win, I can buy mealie-meal and potatoes. If I don’t we don’t eat,” said Emily Mbele, who spends more than a third of her pension on gambling, even though she is supporting five people.
“Gambling is out of control. All these casinos makes it worse,” said a 42-year-old recovering addict, at Gamblers Anonymous’ Johannesburg office.
Some help is at hand.
A programme backed by the industry offers treatment for addicts in eight of South Africa’s 11 official languages at 12 of the country’s hospitals and has fielded nearly 5_000 calls for help since it started nine months ago.
South Africans directed more than one percent of their disposable income to gambling last year, said Azar Jammine, chief economist of the private consultancy Econometrix. That amounted to about R10bn, split more or less evenly between casinos and the lottery.
Gambling, apart from horse racing, was outlawed under the apartheid regime, but the country had a thriving illegal industry operating about 150_000 slot machines.
Seventeen casinos were licensed in the “self-governing” homelands allocated to black South Africans, but they catered basically for white South Africans.
The new government legalised gambling in 1996, two years after coming to power, and 26 luxury casinos have been set up.
Officials say the government earned more than R350m in value added tax from casinos (earning gross revenues of R3bn) and more than R230m in provincial taxes from April 1999 to March 2000. – AFP
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