TOM EATON | Does the gambling industry know when to stop?

All across South Africa, minor celebrities and former sports stars are smiling down at us from billboards, all of them endorsing a fraudulent financial product that also acts as a powerfully addictive drug for well over a million South Africans.

You’d expect backlash. After all, we are a famously activist country, often in stark contrast to our morally compromised government. We march and protest against corrupt presidents. We decry Israel’s barbarism in Gaza. We call for tax boycotts, we cancel racists.

And yet when it comes to these billboards and the gambling pandemic they openly advertise, a pandemic currently destroying households in every town in this country as effectively and viciously as any Steinhoff heist or ultra-potent new drug shipped in from Central America, our response seems to be faint tut-tutting before we get back to blaming foreigners for economic problems created and entrenched by South Africans.

This week the Old Mutual published its annual snapshot of South Africa’s household finances, with a special “deep dive” into gambling that revealed the catastrophic extent to which it has taken hold of this country.

The full report is available for free on Old Mutual’s website, but some highlights ― or lowlights ― stand out.

If Old Mutual’s sample of 1,621 people can be used to extrapolate more widely, just over half of South Africans gamble, and gamble often: 65% of respondents gambled every week, with 32% saying they gambled twice or three times a week, and 10% saying they gambled every day.

To be clear, this isn’t the odd flutter on the Lotto. Sports betting remains by far the most popular form of gambling, with 63% of respondents in this category. After this come slots, then the lottery, casino table games and horse race betting.

Most gamblers in South Africa are young men aged between 18 and 29, although I suspect that the first number is too high: there is increasing anecdotal evidence that gambling, specifically sports betting, has taken hold in many South African schools, but I don’t imagine that any of these children were included in Old Mutual’s sample.

At this point I can hear the spin doctors of the gambling industry interjecting loudly, explaining that gambling is a leisure activity and we can’t prescribe how people have fun. Also, they would insist, they put those useful reminders in the tiny fine print about winners knowing when to stop.

Except what Old Mutual’s figures show is that a large and growing proportion of South Africa’s gamblers aren’t doing it for fun. They’re doing it out of desperation.

In its 2024 report, Old Mutual reported that 36% of respondents said they gambled to help them cover their expenses or debt. In 2025, that figure had grown to 40%. This year, it’s 42%.

In other words, of the half of South Africans who gamble, almost half do it because they’re not earning enough to make ends meet.

Only a small percentage of long-term gamblers make more money than they lose, and when you throw subscription or transaction fees into the mix, it’s an overwhelmingly losing proposition for the huge majority of gamblers.

Unsurprisingly, that desperation is felt most intensely among the poorest: Old Mutual reports that, of those who gamble and who earn between R8,000 and R14,999 a month, 52% gamble in order to try to plug growing holes in their finances.

And it’s not working. Last year, Old Mutual asked a sample of roughly 800 gamblers if they had found themselves “in financial difficulty” because of gambling. Yes, 24% answered. This year, that figure had risen to 41%.

Again, it was the poorest who were the hardest hit, with 54% of respondents in the lowest-earning bracket reporting that gambling had got them deeper into financial trouble.

We know why it’s not working: the house always wins.

Only a small percentage of long-term gamblers make more money than they lose, and when you throw subscription or transaction fees into the mix, it’s an overwhelmingly losing proposition for the huge majority of gamblers.

Those former Springboks and Proteas and beauty queens telling you to play and win are lying. Statistically, if you play enough, you will lose. And that’s to say nothing of the roughly 5% of gamblers who develop an addiction.

Yes, if we woke up one morning to discover that our major sports stadia had been renamed Ponzi Scheme Loftus or Crack Cocaine Newlands there’d be an uproar. But when it’s the names of sports betting companies plastered across every stadium and billboard and website ― crickets.

So what’s the solution?

Start with the advertising and sponsorship. It is illegal to advertise cigarettes in South Africa; advertisements for alcohol are heavy regulated. The same must happen with gambling — either an outright ban, or a complete overhaul of the messaging being put out, messaging that has an extremely powerful effect on the young, male brains that are the most vulnerable to process addiction.

At the very least, we need to decode and paraphrase that friendly-sounding little soundbite they rattle off at the end of every ad: “Winners know when to stop.”

It sounds like helpful advice, but it’s actually an admission and an instruction. It’s the gambling industry saying: you are very likely to win some money if you gamble, but if you keep gambling you will lose it and then lose more. Unless you stop after your first win, you will, like an increasing number of South Africans, be destroyed by our industry.