Ramaphosa extends SIU probe into Lottery

A new proclamation by President Cyril Ramaphosa allows the Special Investigating Unit to extend its investigation into the National Lotteries Commission to include procurement. Archive photo: Ashraf Hendricks

• The Special Investigating Unit (SIU) has had success freezing and recovering stolen Lottery grant money.
• But its mandate only went up to 2020 and didn’t include procurement.
• Now President Cyril Ramaphosa has extended a 2020 proclamation to allow the SIU to investigate corruption that includes procurement up till October 2025.

President Cyril Ramaphosa has finally extended a 2020 proclamation that authorised the Special Investigating Unit to investigate corruption involving Lottery grants, 18 months after the SIU first applied for it.

The scope of the original proclamation has been extended to include fraud and corruption involving procurement by the National Lotteries Commission (NLC).

Although the SIU has come across multiple examples of irregularities, via tip-offs and independent investigations commissioned by the NLC, it has been unable to investigate them because of the tight restrictions of the original proclamation.

The new proclamation has been extended to include offences up to 10 October 2025, when it was gazetted. The original proclamation covered offences that occurred between 1 January 2014 and 20 October 2020, when it was gazetted.

But its terms are not open-ended and identify specific cases of procurement that the SIU is empowered to investigate. Excluded, for example, are several accounting and auditing firms that helped enable the looting of the lottery.

But NLC Commissioner Jodi Scholtz said that the NLC had already investigated some cases of dodgy proclamation not included in the proclamation extension, and reported them to the “relevant authorities”. “We will also hand over those reports to the SIU,” she said.

Most, if not all, of the procurement matters that the SIU has been authorised to probe are based on an October 2023 investigation by audit firm TSU Investigations Services that was commissioned by the NLC.

TSU uncovered fraud, corruption, and extensive circumvention of “procurement processes” running into hundreds of millions of rands. The report has played a key role in disciplinary inquiries involving NLC staff.

The SIU’s application, which has been mired in red tape, has been languishing at the Department of Justice and Correctional Services for almost 18 months. There have also been allegations of political interventions leading to the long delay.

A backlog of applications for SIU proclamations had built up over several years. But, for the past year or so, the rate at which proclamations have been granted has sped up, even as the SIU’s NLC application gathered dust.

There have been three separate Ministers of Justice since the SIU’s extension application was submitted in April 2024: it was submitted while Ronald Lamola was in the job. GroundUp reported how a law firm he directed, Ndobela Lamola Inc, was implicated in Lottery shenanigans.

Lamola was followed by Thembi Simelane, who was moved to the Constitutional Development portfolio after only seven months, after she was implicated in a R500,000 “loan” scandal in 2016 involving the now-defunct VBS Mutual Bank.

She was replaced by Mmamoloko Khubayi, who finally signed the extension 10 months after her December 2024 appointment.

Included in the procurement-related issues the SIU has been authorised to investigate, many of which Groundup has previously reported on, are:

• The appointment of a panel of attorneys’ firms and legal practitioners. In 2023, then Trade, Industry and Competition Minister Ebrahim Patel told Parliament that legal files, including documents from litigation running into tens of millions of rands, had gone missing. He also said that attempts to get details from the lawyers involved about the legal work they had done for the NLC had been unsuccessful.
• The appointment of law firm Maluks to the NLC’s legal panel. Maluks litigated against Patel on several occasions, as part of a campaign of “lawfare” by the previous management and board of the NLC.
• A tender for Neo Africa to investigate a potential hacking incident, which never happened.
• Costs related to accommodation and transport incurred by the previous NLC administration for people involved in adjudicating the recently awarded lottery operator licence.
• The placement of advertorials in the Sunday World newspaper. The NLC spent tens of millions of rands to counter reporting, mainly by GroundUp, exposing corruption involving grants to non-profits. By far the biggest recipient of this increased ad spend was Sunday World, which received about R24.7-million in three years (2020-2022) from the NLC for adverts and advertorials.
• A wellness programme for NLC staff, primarily delivered by Workforce Healthcare (Pty) Ltd.
• The appointment of ProEthics to provide ethics-related services.
• A R1.7-million flashmob activation that never happened, involving MSG Group Sales, and Elsiscope Digital Solutions.

NLC Commissioner Scholz welcomed the gazetting of the extension of the Special Investigating Unit’s (SIU) investigation of ”maladministration in the organisation”.

“This development underscores our commitment to transparency and good governance. We look forward to continuing our collaboration with the SIU to address any irregularities and ensure that our operations are aligned with the highest standards of integrity and accountability.”

More about National Lotteries Commission

• Process to appoint new Lottery chair underway 24 October 2025
• Claims of political links to Paul Mashatile are just “gossip”, winning Lottery bidder says 17 October 2025
• Lottery commits R124-million to fight HIV and TB 16 October 2025

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