South Africa had appointed a commission to study whether online gambling should be legalized or not and they came out with the recommendation that it should. People presumed that this commission was set up so that the government may act upon its recommendations, and rumors had it that regulated online gambling was on the way in South Africa.
In response to these recent rumors, the South African government has made it clear that they have no intention of legalizing online gambling in their country and in spite of the recommendations of the gambling commission they feel strongly that permitting this would cause harm to the people of their country.
South Africa does permit gambling but has shied away from offering it online. Many South Africans still partake in it without the blessing of the government, and governments are generally pretty powerless to stop it in fact.
So with regulation comes a greater degree of control, and while South Africa claims they do not have the resources to protect the online gambling market from abuses to the extent they would like to, some control would certainly be preferable to the absolutely none that they have now.
It may be more politically expedient to just pretend that online gambling does not exist in your country and that your not seeking to get involved in this arena means that you aren’t contributing to problem gambling, but in doing so you are simply failing to act at all to take measures against this and allowing a free for all environment with no real restrictions on any of this to persist.
So that all seems like a long way away from happening in South Africa, and when you have recommendations that are based upon reason rejected like this, they look like they are just digging their heels in like many countries are doing and playing the see no evil game while forsaking potential additional tax revenue and seeing money flow out of the country uncontrolled. Whether they are able to do that forever though may be another matter.
