Lotteries Commissioner doesn’t want to tell Parliament who scored a Covid-19 tender

Issued by Mat Cuthbert MP – DA Shadow Deputy Minister of Trade, Industry and Competition
09 Jun 2021 in News

In response to parliamentary questions posed by the DA, the Commissioner at the National Lotteries Commission (NLC), Thabang Mampane, has chosen to hide behind Regulation 8 of the Lotteries Act in order to avoid telling Parliament who scored a Covid-19 tender (See attached).

The tender issued by the NLC was for a service provider to conduct research on the social, economic and operational impact of the Coronavirus pandemic on funded organisations.

According to the NLC, the tender’s value was set at R460 287.50, not an insubstantial amount of taxpayer money to spend on an exercise in vanity (See attached).

In essence, the services required were to inform the NLC as to how they go about spending the R150 Million they had allocated to their Covid-19 Relief meant for distressed organisations.

The NLC last appeared before the portfolio committee on trade, industry and competition in September 2020 and informed us that only R32 million of the R150 million had been disbursed to beneficiaries.

It is clear that whoever the service provider was, they did not assist the NLC in allocating much-needed funding to organisations who were already in severe distress.

It is clear that the NLC and by extension its commissioner, have not learnt from their attempts to conceal grant beneficiaries in 2020, when Parliament’s legal advisor found their use of regulation 8 to defend their actions was in fact unconstitutional.

Therefore, the DA will be submitting a PAIA application to the NLC to obtain this information as we firmly believe that is in the public interest.

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