BUTI MANAMELA | Gambling with their futures: when despair becomes a digital habit

We are long past the point of denial. What was once whispered in corridors and scoffed at as anecdotal now confronts us in the raw, unforgiving data: students are using their NSFAS allowances to gamble. Not occasionally, not by accident, routinely, strategically, and in growing numbers. This is no longer a fringe concern. It is a warning flare from the heart of our higher education system.

The Daily Maverick exposé makes for painful reading. Students describe betting away textbook funds, food stipends, even the allowances meant to support their children. They speak of debt spirals, shame and the corrosive reach of apps like Aviator and Betway. They speak of being hunted by creditors in their residences. Of lying to their families. Of depression, of dropout, of defeat.

And yet this is not a story of individual failure. It is a story of systemic abandonment. We are witnessing the consequences of a generation raised on scarcity, locked out of employment, bombarded by spectacle, and left to navigate economic despair with little more than data bundles and the false promise of instant fortune. In a world where everything feels rigged, gambling begins to look like strategy.

To understand this phenomenon, one must also understand the psychology of the gambler. Gambling is not simply a financial act; it is psychological theatre. It seduces the mind with the illusion of control and the thrill of uncertainty. The anticipation of a win releases dopamine in the brain the same chemical responsible for feelings of joy and achievement creating a cycle of pleasure and pursuit. Each small win fuels the belief that a bigger one is coming, while each loss intensifies the need to recover, trapping individuals in a loop of expectation and despair.

For students facing financial insecurity, this psychological lure becomes even more dangerous. They begin to equate luck with survival, mistaking gambling for an escape from poverty rather than a deepening of it. What begins as curiosity or a harmless thrill easily mutates into compulsion, fuelled by the illusion that one “big win” will rewrite their circumstances.

Gambling, like poverty, is never accidental. It is manufactured, marketed and made to feel inevitable. But it is not.

But the tragedy here is not only individual. Our universities and colleges are not detached from society; they are microcosms of it. They mirror our collective struggles, the widening inequality, the glorification of instant wealth, the social media-driven obsession with status. When gambling infiltrates campuses, it reflects the deeper rot of a society where patience has become unfashionable, where slow growth is mocked, and where material success is valued above integrity.

Students are not gambling because they are careless, they are gambling because they have been taught, consciously and unconsciously, that in a world rigged against them, luck may be the only fair referee left.

For students benefiting from financial aid, the stakes are even higher. These funds represent more than just money, they are a trust, a collective investment by society in their potential. To use them as betting chips is to betray that trust and to gamble not only with money but with one’s own future.

The notion that one can multiply a government allowance through chance is a dangerous illusion, often marketed by a predatory industry that thrives on desperation. Financial aid should be a bridge to stability, not a pipeline to financial ruin. Students must resist this trap and see through the glossy promises of “quick wins” and “easy money”. True enrichment comes from persistence, education and the patient building of skill and character.

The gambling industry, meanwhile, continues to cloak itself in legitimacy, using sports heroes and digital influencers to sell addiction as aspiration. Betting adverts follow students online, flashing data-free access and “deposit bonuses” designed to keep them hooked.

Gambling has crept into the everyday rhythms of youth life, the halftime of a football match, the break between lectures, the late-night scroll on campus Wi-Fi. It no longer takes place in dark casinos but in the bright blue glow of a phone screen.

This is not merely a moral issue, it is a design flaw in the digital economy, where profit is extracted from vulnerability.

The state cannot claim ignorance. Our gambling laws are relics of a pre-digital era, unfit for the app-driven landscape where addiction is algorithmically engineered.

NSFAS agreements, for all their administrative clauses, remain silent on this growing danger. Universities have yet to treat gambling addiction with the same seriousness as substance abuse or academic misconduct. There is a vacuum of both policy and protection, and in that vacuum, despair has found a home.

But the solution cannot rest solely on legislation or enforcement. What must change is the collective consciousness, the way we talk about money, success and worth. Students must be encouraged to see financial aid as an opportunity to invest in their future, not as a means to test their luck.

Institutions must incorporate financial and digital literacy into their student support systems, ensuring that young people understand both the power and the peril of their digital environments.

Gambling is not a sign of recklessness; it is a cry for hope, distorted by circumstance. To counter it, we must restore that hope through mentorship, opportunity and a reassertion of the dignity of work and learning.

What we are witnessing is a generational rupture. When the public purse becomes a ticket for private extraction, when effort is mocked and luck is monetised, when addiction is marketed as freedom, something precious is lost. We do not just lose graduates; we lose builders, dreamers, citizens.

As the ministry of higher education and training, we have a duty to act to fight for a new ethics of learning, support and care. This means rewriting NSFAS agreements to ban gambling with public funds, blocking access to betting platforms on campus networks and state-issued laptops, and embedding financial and political education, not as box-ticking exercises but acts of empowerment.

We must stand up to the betting industry, its influencers and its corporate sponsors. We must push back against the normalisation of gambling as a lifestyle and the glorification of easy money. And we must ask, uncomfortably but honestly, why so many young people find more reward and identity in a betting slip than in a degree certificate.

Gambling, like poverty, is never accidental. It is manufactured, marketed and made to feel inevitable. But it is not. This can be changed. We cannot afford to sit quietly while our most vulnerable students become the primary targets of the digital casino. We cannot treat this as a moral failure when it is, in truth, a political one.

The stakes are higher than we think, for students who lose their allowances and for the society that loses its sense of purpose. We owe them more than sympathy. We owe them a fight and the promise that education will never again be the bait in someone else’s game.

Buti Manamela is the minister of higher education and training