Minister appoints ten new lottery grant assessors after year-long delay

The National Lotteries Commission says there is no longer a backlog of outstanding grant applications. Illustration: Lisa Nelson

After a year-long delay, while the National Lotteries Commission (NLC) had too few people to adjudicate grant applications, Minister of Trade, Industry and Competition Parks Tau has at last appointed ten distributing agency members.

They will be responsible for assessing grant applications across the NLC’s charities, sport and recreation, arts, culture and national heritage, and miscellaneous sectors.

The vacancies in the distributing agency committee had left 3,413 of 5,304 grant applications from 2023/24 still waiting to be assessed in August last year, five months after the end of the financial year.

The committee is supposed to have a minimum of nine members, but had only three until July 2024, when two new members were appointed by former trade minister Ebrahim Patel.

The adjudication process was also delayed because of new pre-adjudication measures introduced to stop corruption which had overwhelmed the NLC under its previous executive and board.

In a briefing to Parliament’s Standing Committee on Public Accounts (SCOPA) in May, the Auditor-General’s office raised several concerns, notably a massive underspending on grants caused by distribution agency vacancies and systemic weaknesses in grant processing and internal controls.

The NLC “encountered some difficulties” that “much delayed” the distribution of grants to worthy causes, NLC board chairperson Barney Pityana noted in the Commission’s 2025/26 annual performance plan.

The unprecedented backlog was caused by the expiry of the contracts of previous distributing agency members in 2023 and in April last year. Several members had already had their contracts renewed several times.

NLC Commissioner Jodi Scholtz told GroundUp that there was no longer a backlog of outstanding grant applications.

“The previous DA managed to clear that backlog before we even issued the new call [for grant applications].

“The new DA members are currently undergoing induction and will start adjudicating the call that ended on 30 May 2025. We now have ten members who are able to adjudicate across the various sectors to ensure that we respond within the 150-day legislative turnaround timeframe,” she said.

Three chairpersons have been appointed to head the application adjudication process. They are Chickey Silvy Mofet-Mubu, Thulani Skosana and Zukiswa Yoliswa Zinhle. Unlike before, their role is not sector-specific and they will work across all the NLC’s grant application sectors.

Ordinary members, however, will be sector-specific “to speed up the adjudication process”, said Scholtz.

Support independent journalism
Donate using Payfast