It still might be a few more years until the South African government takes over the running of the lottery, but at least we can guess its new slogan already: Tata ma chance, ta-ta ma billions.

According to the Sunday Times, Sizekhaya Holdings, tapped to take over from Ithuba, is likely to be the last private company to oversee the continued transfer of money from the very poor to the increasingly rich, with plans afoot to see the lottery handed over to the state once Sizekhaya’s turn at the trough comes to an end.

Once this handover happens, Sizekhaya board chairperson Moses Tembe explained, the new government-run lottery would look something like current lotteries in China, where, in a rare nod to actual communism, the Chinese Communist Party controls the means of production, or at least the means of producing gambling addicts.

To be fair, not all lottery players in South Africa are addicts being deliberately preyed upon by cynical millionaires: most are just desperately poor people being deliberately preyed upon by cynical millionaires.

Still, you can understand why our Government of National Unity should be so keen to get its hands on this gigantic money-printing machine, not least because so much of that money comes without immediate political cost.

Everyone in the GNU now knows that if they even so much as think about raising taxes again the country will go into paroxysms and the very foundations of the coalition government will start crumbling; but roll out a raft of sparkly new sports betting options and you’ve transformed from killjoy to fairy godmother, offering to turn paupers into royalty with one swish of your magic wand. And best of all, according to research by Unisa reported by GroundUp, most lotto players in this country are dipping into their social grants to play, which means the state would effectively be getting back a percent or two of its welfare spend. Who says South Africa doesn’t have a plan to end poverty?

Personally, however, I can’t help feeling that the prospect of a state-run lotto is less of a red flag than an entire factory that makes red flags but which, having failed to see a number of other red flags, is now on fire. And if you want my evidence, let me refer you, like Moses Tembe, to the country that coincidentally makes a lot of red flags.

China, you will recall, is a country in which, if you don’t have the right friends in government and you are accused of corruption, there’s a fairly good chance that will be given a very short, very dodgy trial, followed by a lethal injection or a firing squad. If you’re lucky, you may be sent for re-education somewhere cold and lonely, but either way, every Chinese official knows that stealing large sums of money is a one-way ticket to extremely bad things.

And yet, despite this deterrent looming so large that even we know about it down here in South Africa, Chinese officials were found in 2015 to have stolen R46bn of lotto funds to buy offices and hotels, reportedly about a quarter of all the money taken in by China’s state lotteries between 2012 and 2014.

No doubt all sorts of people went to all sorts of prisons — or worse — but three years later their former colleagues were still at it: in 2018 the South China Morning Post reported on the popular rumour in China that officials had stolen another R330bn of lotto largesse. Of course, rumours are not facts, but the government didn’t exactly refute the allegations when it announced that revealing the real figure would be “inconvenient”.

Which brings us back to South Africa, and the prospect of a state-run lottery pulling in almost R10bn a year, and the obvious question: if Chinese lotto administrators know they can be put against a wall and shot, and yet still can’t resist jamming their hands into the cookie jar, just what kind of feeding frenzy will we be witnessing here once our consequence-free cadres class gets properly stuck in?