Bid Committee 'Unqualified'

REPUTATION: National Lottery Evaluators Don't Have Experience in Lotteries

- Raymond Joseph

The committee that evaluated the eight bids for South Africa's recently awarded multi-billion-rand lottery licence consisted of people with experience in gaming, horse racing, gambling and casinos, but none appear to have any experience with lotteries.

Insiders consulted by GroundUp pointed out that there is a difference between lotteries, gambling and gaming which, they say, are two different kinds of operations and require different skills to operate.

With a lottery, where a large share of the proceeds goes to fund good causes, the operator does not participate. But with gambling, players compete individually against the operator and it is in the operator's interest to win against the players.

The commissioner of the National Lotteries Commission (NLC), Jodi Scholtz, told GroundUp that there were not many independent lottery experts in SA.

"Previously, the work [of evaluating licence bids] was outsourced to a competent service provider. But on this occasion, for a variety of reasons, it was very difficult in the time we had to get that external provider in place," NLC chair Barney Pityana told the committee.

Instead, the NLC was forced to hire an independent recruitment agency after "big" auditing firms, which had previously evaluated consortiums bidding for SA's lottery licence, did not want to be involved in the process.