--- title: "South Africa can’t win a bet against online gambling" description: "South Africans wagered R1.76-trillion last year, most of it from a phone. The state wants to protect them, tax the operators and, in some quarters, switch the offshore ones off. What it can’t yet do is agree on who gets to flip the switch." type: "NewsArticle" publisher: "Daily Maverick" site: "https://www.dailymaverick.co.za" section: "ANALYSIS" author: "Lindsey Schutters" author_url: "https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/author/lindsey-schutters-2/" canonical_url: "https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2026-11-15-south-africa-cant-win-a-bet-against-online-gambling/" published: "2026-11-15T21:23:03" lang: "en-ZA" word_count: 1999 --- # South Africa can’t win a bet against online gambling > South Africans wagered R1.76-trillion last year, most of it from a phone. The state wants to protect them, tax the operators and, in some quarters, switch the offshore ones off. What it can’t yet do is agree on who gets to flip the switch. By Lindsey Schutters · Published 15 November 2026, 23:23 SAST ## Content The first app that opens when a South African student’s allowance lands is increasingly an international betting site. Those sites are now accepting rands. It has a South African web address. At the foot of the page, in a grey font designed not to be read, sits a gambling licence from Curaçao. None of that makes the site legal. All of it makes the site look legal, which, according to Sean Coleman, CEO of the South African Bookmakers’ Association, is the whole trick. “Don’t be fooled by appearances,” he warns. That gap between what looks regulated and what actually is sits at the centre of Mzansi’s current online betting problem. There is a licensed, taxpaying and commercially thriving betting industry. Alongside it runs an illicit one that has learnt to live in the grey area. And over both sits a framework whose key statute was written in 2004, three years before the first iPhone, and which divides power between Pretoria and nine provinces in a way that makes decisive action close to impossible. Nobody is arguing that betting should be banned. Online sports betting is legal here, licensed, taxed and, for reasons that are not hard to find, enormously popular. The fight is over who gets to set the terms. ### **The money moved to the phone** In the 2025/26 financial year, national gambling turnover hit R1.76-trillion, up from R1.50-trillion the year before. Gross gambling revenue (GGR), which is a polite way of saying what punters lost, rose 13.4% to R84.5-billion. Provinces collected R6.45-billion in taxes and levies, up 10.9%. The more interesting number is who is actually doing the winning. Betting took 74% of national GGR (R62.2-billion) and 80% of turnover. Three years ago, betting GGR was R23.7-billion. It has since grown more than two-and-a-half times. Casinos, the industry around which the whole regulatory architecture was built, are down to 19% of GGR. Limited payout machines (V Slots) hold 5% and bingo 2%. Mobile accounts for 91% of digital wagering. Statistics South Africa’s Personal Services Industry report puts the household effect in a number that deserves a second read: gambling activities, primarily online bookmaking, now consume 54.5% of total household expenditure allocated to recreation, sport and culture. The tax take tells a quieter, more important story. ![Gambling](https://cdn.dailymaverick.co.za/i/rbZwqHLbLEQKjTNnw2qb-CMsZJk=/200x100/smart/filters:strip_exif\(\)/file/dailymaverick/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Gross-gambling-revenue-2.jpg) Betting generates 74% of GGR but only 64% of provincial gambling taxes and levies. Traditional casinos, on 19% of GGR, still contributed about R1.66-billion, roughly a quarter of the total, and limited payout machines another R542.8-million. The part of the industry that is growing is paying proportionally less than the part that is shrinking. The tax system, like the licensing system, is still weighted towards the world it was built for, not the world that is. ### **A duty to protect** The government’s stated worry is social rather than fiscal. Communications and Digital Technologies Minister Solly Malatsi has framed it as a duty: sports betting offers real revenue opportunities for teams and federations, he said, but the state has to be alert to what online gambling does in a country where many people are “poor, unemployed, desperate, and have low levels of financial literacy”. ![Minister Solly Malatsi Launches Roadmap On Digital Transformation Of The South African Government](https://cdn.dailymaverick.co.za/i/u0SLIoRy7INw2cnof-x9-6UaTms=/200x100/smart/filters:strip_exif\(\)/file/attachments/orphans/Tamsin-SAHRC-onlinesafety2_258785.jpg) *Solly Malatsi, Minister of Communications and Digital Technologies. (Photo: Gallo Images/OJ Koloti)* The National Gambling Board has put some texture on that. Persistent unemployment and rising living costs, it says, have led economically vulnerable people to treat gambling as a substitute for income, with a marked escalation among tertiary students receiving National Student Financial Aid Scheme allowances and among recipients of South African Social Security Agency grants. That is the student from the top of this piece, and it is the grant recipient on the other side of town. The treatment data is harder to read. The National Responsible Gambling Foundation treated 3,541 people in 2025/26, out of 5,443 treatment-related counselling calls, with problem gambling concentrated among young people and working-age adults. Its helpline logged 1.26-million incoming calls, but most were administrative inquiries. Call volumes and treatment numbers measure the capacity of the response, not the size of the problem, and the data we have doesn’t really measure the second. ### **In provincial hands** Under Schedule 4 of the Constitution, gambling is a concurrent competence of national and provincial government. In practice, that puts the National Gambling Act on top of nine provincial licensing authorities that grant the licences and receive the tax. The National Gambling Board has said as much itself: its statutory powers to enforce compliance are limited when provinces adopt divergent standards or issue approvals that push national boundaries. The incentives are worth naming, even if nobody is being accused of anything. The bodies that licence operators are the same bodies that collect from them, and the money is not spread evenly. Mpumalanga and the Western Cape account for 30% and 29% of national collections respectively. Into that gap steps the communications minister. Malatsi has said it is important to understand “what measures can appropriately be taken within the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa’s (Icasa’s) regulatory mandate” where electronic communications networks and services are used to facilitate access to gambling and betting products. It is an understandable instinct. If the gambling toolbox is split between nine provinces and a board with limited powers, reach for the one next door. And the National Gambling Board has itself identified the missing tool: there is no operational, state-level IP or website-blocking architecture. Networks are what Icasa regulates. The connection is not hard to draw. Wayne Lurie of Lurie Inc Attorneys is having none of it. “A bet does not become unlawful simply because it is placed on a cellphone,” he says, adding that neither the minister nor Icasa can use telecommunications regulation to rewrite gambling law or assume powers Parliament has assigned elsewhere. > “Consumer protection cannot create legal powers that do not exist.” Lurie has a point, and it is the uncomfortable one. A state that patches a gap in one statute with powers borrowed from another is inviting precisely the argument he has just rehearsed. ### **The legal loophole** Then there is the line that everyone agrees on and nobody can quite police. Interactive online casino gambling, meaning slots and table games, is prohibited under Section 11 of the National Gambling Act. The Remote Gambling Bill (B11-2024) would legalise and regulate it, but the Bill is grinding through Parliament and is unlikely to be enacted before 2027. Demand did not wait. Provincial bookmaker licences strictly cover fixed-odds wagering on sporting and contingent events, and operators read “contingent events” generously enough to fit virtual roulette, electronic slot simulations and live-dealer casino games. In October 2025, the Supreme Court of Appeal shut that reading down, ruling that bookmakers are legally prohibited from offering roulette and casino-style games. The software layer followed. Operators and providers had been submitting Remote Gaming Servers (RGS), the engines behind digital casino games, for technical certification under provincial standards. The National Gambling Board advised the Department of Trade, Industry and Competition (dtic) and the National Regulator for Compulsory Specifications (NRCS) that RGS architectures facilitate unlawful interactive gambling under Section 11. The NRCS then halted all new, renewed or extended Letters of Certification for RGS products. That is the system working as designed, and it is also the problem. For compliant operators, the pipeline is slow and costly: testing-lab requirements such as SANS 1718, and provincial reviews that run anywhere from three to 12 months. For operators outside the jurisdiction, there is no pipeline at all. Compliance is the slow lane. ### **Leaky books** Offshore is the real issue. Because online random number generator (RNG) casino games remain prohibited, roughly 62% of online gambling activity takes place on unlicensed sites, diverting more than R50-billion (€2.4-billion) in GGR offshore each year. An estimated 16 million South Africans use them. The Consumer Goods Council of South Africa puts the direct tax loss at about R7.7-billion a year and the displacement at more than 30,000 formal and informal jobs. The platforms get there by hosting servers abroad, marketing through digital influencers and sports sponsorships, and accepting rands, local cards and digital vouchers. The state has no automated domain-takedown system and cannot legally enforce domestic gambling law against foreign corporate entities without cross-border treaties. For practical purposes, they are untouchable. The stick that has landed so far is aimed at winnings. Under Section 16 of the National Gambling Act, more than R3-million in unlawful gambling winnings has been forfeited to the State through high court orders, R775,000 of it in 2025/26 and R2.3-million in the early part of 2026/27. CEO of the SA Bookmakers’ Association Coleman’s warning is the consumer version: winnings from illegal gambling, he says, “can be forfeited to the State”. Set R3-million against R50-billion walking out of the country, and the mismatch speaks for itself. ### **A fifth of a problem** The most contested lever is tax. In its November 2025 discussion paper, the National Treasury proposed an additional 20% national tax on online betting GGR. The Treasury’s pitch is that an industry that generates social harm should carry more of the cost of it. Garron Whitesman of Whitesmans Attorneys argues that the government must show any additional tax will achieve its objectives without putting the billions the industry contributes at risk. [Media: "Chart: Proposed gambling surcharge would more than double operators' effective tax rate"](https://charts.dailymaverick.co.za/chart/7c76b4f6c7fe54f6544e6095) If higher taxes push consumers into the illegal market, he warns, government risks undermining “the very regulatory system designed to protect them”, eroding provincial revenue and threatening jobs and investment. Lurie makes the same case: a 40% effective rate makes legal bookmakers uncompetitive and sends punters to a tax-free offshore alternative. A tax designed to price harm could push players towards the operators with no obligations to a South African regulator, no responsible-gambling mandate to speak of and no tax to pay. The regulators’ own language cuts the other way. Vusi Mtsweni, CEO of the Mpumalanga Economic Regulator, says compliance is “part of the cost of doing business”, and has a message for would-be entrants: > “Don’t come to South Africa just looking for a licence, come prepared to earn the trust that comes with that licence.” From the continent’s side, Peter Emolemo Kesitilwe, CEO of the African iGaming Alliance, expects the biggest trend in Africa to be the shift from growth at all costs to sustainable, regulated growth, with markets rewarding operators that can demonstrate compliance, responsible gaming and tax transparency. Meanwhile, the licensed industry is hardly on its knees. Sun International’s physical casino revenue inched up 1.5% to R3.4-billion in the interim period to June 2026. Sunbet, its digital arm, grew income 35.5% to R1.2-billion, helping lift the group’s interim dividend by 7.6%. Those are the numbers that make a Treasury proposal tempting. They are also the numbers the industry will point to when it argues how portable that growth is. A punter loyal to a licensed brand at an effective 18% tax is a punter one app away from an unlicensed brand at none. ### **Who gets to be the house?** So, in South Africa you have a Constitution that splits the power. An Act older than the smartphone. A Bill that will not land before 2027. A tax that could double the licensed burden. A minister reaching into a telecoms mandate. A regulator that says it has no blocking switch. And against that sits a licensed industry growing at double digits and an offshore one handling more than half of the online activity in a market where it cannot be sued. Judge the system by what it delivers rather than what it intends and the verdict is uncomfortable. The state’s concern for the vulnerable is real. So are the legal limits Lurie describes. So is the industry’s warning about tax flight. All three are true at once, and no single actor has the power to resolve them. Whatever else the system fails to deliver on the first of the month, the bonus offer arrives right on cue. Until someone is clearly responsible for what happens after the notification, the house will keep winning. It just won’t be clear whose house it is. **DM**