Do a quick Google for South Africa’s top online casinos, and you’d be forgiven for thinking that playing roulette, blackjack, slots games and other casino favourites on your computer or phone in South Africa is totally fine and above board. Just check out the big, shiny, tantalising array of casino operators aiming their services specifically at South African gamblers. We’re not talking about shady, illicit little operations – these are well-known names that are regulated and licensed by respected gambling bodies like the Malta Gaming Authority and the Gibraltar Licensing Authority. You’ll see lucrative welcome bonuses offered in rand, and one site even has the word “Springbok” in its name. They’re not exactly trying to conceal who they’re targeting.

All of which is rather interesting, given the fact that online casino gambling is actually banned in South Africa.

Yep. Despite outward appearances on the Internet, South Africa’s National Gambling Board, which oversees gambling throughout the nation, makes the legal position clear on its website, warning that “if you gamble online, your winnings will be confiscated by your bank before they reach your bank account. You will not receive your winnings. You will be investigated and could face criminal charges.”

This restriction doesn’t apply to online sports betting, which is perfectly legal in South Africa. But online casino games are, officially speaking, a no-go. It’s not entirely surprising, when you consider how the powers-that-be in South Africa have always taken a very dim view of gambling, since way back in the day. 

A ban on all forms of gambling except horse racing was officially enacted in 1965, and this merely put onto paper the restrictions that were already in existence. Over the decades that followed, thousands of illegal casinos sprang up across the country, like speakeasy bars in Prohibition-era America. Sure, many were just rooms with a couple of slot machines in them, but they revealed an abiding appetite for gambling in the population – and a potential source of immense income for the government, if they went ahead and made it legal.

That eventually happened in 1996, more or less coinciding with the dawn of post-Apartheid South Africa. Casinos – of the bricks-and-mortar variety – were finally allowed to operate, but the world was hurtling into the age of the Internet, and the age of online casinos. The latter proved to be a hard limit for the South African government, with the National Gambling Act of 2004 firmly outlawing iGaming (not counting online sportsbooks, which can operate with licenses provided by each province’s own gambling board). Things were ratcheted up further in 2010, with more legislation that made it illegal for casino sites to offer their services to South Africans even if their servers are based abroad. 

So that’s the lay of the land, in theory. But in practice, as we already touched on earlier in this piece, droves of gamblers are clearly continuing to access off-shore casino sites. There seems to be some lingering ambiguity in the wake of an attempt, back in 2008, to amend the National Gambling Act to “provide for the regulation of interactive gambling”, “provide for the conditions applicable to interactive gambling licenses” and lay the foundations for legal online gambling in the country. 

While the 2008 amendment was never actually ratified, these more conciliatory noises about iGaming in South Africa presumably emboldened gamblers to carry on skirting the rules on their desktops, laptops, smartphones and tablets. It would also inevitably have encouraged off-shore casino websites to carry on targeting South Africans with their glitzy, colourful wares, and third-party casino comparison sites to carry on promoting what they rather misleadingly call “South African online casinos”. Together, these foreign-based casinos and comparison sites continue to form a big, glittering nexus of apparent respectability, uncowed by South Africa’s official policy.

Just this year, a clearly irritated National Gambling Board issued a statement which impatiently acknowledged that “issue of the legality of online or interactive gambling is the subject of debate in some circles”. This statement certainly didn’t mince its words, saying: “To eliminate any uncertainty in this regard, the NGB wishes to make it emphatically clear that the answer to whether online or interactive gambling is legal in South Africa, is a simple and unequivocal NO.”

Of course, the existence of the 2008 amendment still hangs heavy over the debate, providing a roadmap to how the government could potentially legalise and regulate the online gambling market. South African legislators could perhaps take some cues from the UK’s firm but fair approach to iGaming. Consider the recent British ban on gambling using credit card payments – a ban which also covers credit card payments through e-wallets like PayPal. This was a big and important step, taken to tackle what the chief executive of the UK Gambling Commission called the “significant financial harm” that can result from credit card gambling.

Of course, there are many in South Africa who’ll always firmly oppose any change to the 2004 National Gambling Act, for various reasons. A concern over the risk of problem gambling among users of online casino sites would be a big one – even if restrictions like the UK ban on credit card payments were put into place. Others might be very protective of South Africa’s land-based casinos, which would obviously take an income hit if customers decided to stay home to spin virtual roulette wheels and play live dealer webcam blackjack instead. 

Still, the situation clearly needs resolving. The fact that the National Gambling Board saw fit to recently issue such a grumpy public reminder of the illegality of online gambling just highlights how this illicit habit is going as strong as ever, despite the threat of fines and even imprisonment. It’s also worth considering the words of Themba Ngobese, the chief executive of the Casino Association of South Africa, who back in 2017 voiced concern over how much potential tax profit was being lost to illegal gambling – profit that could have been spent on education and other key sectors. “The government has two options,” Ngobese said in an interview. “One is to keep the current status quo, where it is illegal, but then you must enforce the law; you must make sure it doesn’t happen. Alternatively, you must legalise it and have proper regulation.”

Either way, it’ll be very interesting to see how things unfold, and whether the fallout of the Covid-19 pandemic will nudge us towards the legalisation of iGaming at last.