On 24 July the Meropa Casino in Polokwane is as dead as the hopes of Brazilian football at the moment of the final whistle at this year’s FIFA semi-finals. A day later – pay day in this part of the world – it’s pumping as the witless indigents who keep this Sun International property alive come to squander their grocery budget. The casino’s GM has been having lunch with a member of the gaming board. His out-of-office tells whoever has been naive enough to send him an email that he will be leaving the employ of Meropa at the end of August. When I mention to him that I understand he will be in another job quite soon he explains that he has been running a couple of businesses as a kind of moonlighting operation and now he’s ready to spend all of his time on his own enterprises. They’re clearly doing better than the property he’s supposed to manage.

The official in-house restaurant on the premises is called the Harvest Grill, and its kitchen closes strictly at 10 p.m. – no matter how many guests pitch for dinner. Our group arrived at 9.30 and placed its very simple orders straight away. Nearly an hour later nothing had arrived. The truth is, no one cares. Food comes from a service-provider: Sun International deals in gambling, and evidently works with margins so fat it doesn’t matter if its designated service provider gets the job done properly or not. It’s been granted a monopoly, and if its GM can wine-and-dine the man who is supposed to be policing its performance – who’s to worry about the quality of the service it renders? Certainly, no one seems concerned that a whole lot of people will blow their month’s wages on machines so loaded in favour of the house that the operators in Las Vegas would howl with envy. Under these circumstances, whoever’s running the show – which definitely does not include the GM – gives less than a continental that the steakhouse is so far behind the service curve its hardline take-it-or-leave-it-this-is-the-way-we-do-things approach would be the ideal of a soviet-era apparatchnik.

Other than the Ranch Motel – which is still in private hands – nothing here actually seems to work, and no one is particularly concerned about the perennial sense of failure which hangs like a pall over the place. Untrained staff expect to be shouted at and abused, contractors expect to do nothing and be paid for it: it feels like a caricature of a Graham Greene novel, placed in a backwater setting where even the flies can’t be bothered to make enough noise to wake the locals from their stupor.

I go to Polokwane because once upon a time it used to be an evolving wine market. The decline of the local platinum industry, coupled with a marginalised local administration, has turned it from a boomtown to an impoverished administrative hub. It has become a meeting place of the urban poor, who have gathered here in their multitudes, and the new mafia, which lives very well off the carrion of the once-fat beast. Polokwane used to exude the optimism of the New South Africa, of Archbishop Tutu’s Rainbow Nation – of the infinite possibilities which stretched before us before the Arms Deal, Nkandla, the plague of robber barons and public wealth.

It’s hard to fault the choices made by people like the casino’s GM: in this part of the world there’s either easy money or no money. Also, there’s no point in taking a stand against the erosion of morality and infrastructure: the third law of thermodynamics applies equally to both. As the desert takes over, what began as a single brick falling off the facade of the edifice swiftly becomes a crumbling wall and then just an outline in the sand. In a few years’ time the grand dreams which Polokwane almost realised will be forgotten. The Mall of the North, which already reflects the stratifications of the society, will serve the two extremes of the gini coefficient and pretty much nothing else in-between.

It’s no surprise that the moment anyone has any money they come to the casino: anything, including the poverty that afflicts almost everyone in this dusty oasis, is better than these brief glimpses of the promised land from the other side of the Jordan River. If you’re going to lose it all, it hardly matters: being without money is a permanent condition. But if, despite the odds, you strike it big, there’s just a chance you can escape the fate in store for everyone else in this particular city of the plain.

I used to think that the social grant system, which has become a way of life for 13 million South Africans, was one of the best things the fiscus could do with the tax-take. Now I’m not so sure. I have no doubt that a significant percentage of what is handed out each month goes into gambling – casinos and the lotto – even before it’s allocated to other non-essential items like cell-phones.

What I don’t understand is why an otherwise utterly puritanical ANC which moralises about alcohol (even more than it does about drugs) turns a blind eye to the never-ending, ever-unfolding tragedy which lurks within the portals of our casinos. I’m not suggesting that, like the Apartheid government, it should drive gamblers underground – this kind of addiction is better in the open, but it should be more rigorously policed. The government certainly could do a lot more to minimise the havoc that casinos bring to the millions of households which go without the most basic essentials because the breadwinner is nothing other than a conduit carrying whatever money touches his (or her) hands to the slot machines owned by some of our most “respectable” corporates. (It could start by insisting that only tax-payers in current good standing with SARS are allowed in).

The argument that alcohol abuse affects more than the consumer – it’s implicated in road deaths and in the unhappiness suffered by the alcoholic’s family – is often used to justify the repressive legislation the ANC loves to draft. Proper policing would have a significant impact on drunk driving: what has been achieved in the UK, Australia (and even France) in the past two decades has proved that. If alcohol vanished from our society, domestic violence wouldn’t go away. However, social workers and social engineers would then be forced to address its root causes without the convenient scape-goat of the ‘demon drink’.

That may be when they take a closer look at the institutionalised evil of state-sponsored gambling: licensed casinos and the lotto. If you live in abject poverty, if the absence of work leaves you feeling emasculated, if you take whatever little you have and routinely blow it at the casino – so that you need someone to blame for how things have turned out – you too might turn violent on your nearest and dearest. It’s going to take a lot more work than the ANC (and the supporters it foists onto the public service) could possibly invest to sort out this unholy mess. Sadly they also have no incentive to try. The GM of the Meropa was entertaining guests to the Springbok Nude Gals from Strip-SA cabaret with several bottles of Johnnie Walker Black at his night club a week or two back. He clearly has a budget designed to make sure problems go away. His employers pay big money for their licences. As taxpayers they contribute to the bottomless maw of the fiscus. Who – in a position of influence or authority – is going to stand up and put an end to this travesty? DM