African states hike gambling taxes as addiction soars – SABC News

A boom in gambling and particularly online gambling is sweeping Africa.
The biggest market in the continent is South Africa, where the industry regulator estimates that two-thirds of adults engage in online gambling.
That’s up from 30% in 2017.
Statistics from the National Gambling Board show South Africans wagered a record 1.5 trillion rand, more than $93 billion, in the 2024-25 financial year.
And alongside that surge is an alarming rise in gambling addiction.
“Its survival. We’re trying to gamble ourselves to prosperity and that’s not how a country becomes prosperous.”
Sibongile Simelane-Quntana is the executive director of the South African Responsible Gambling Foundation.
She told Reuters distress calls to a national helpline for gambling addicts have surged by more than two-thirds over the past year.
“We are playing out of desperation as a country, we are desperate. There’s high number of unemployment.”
To meet the challenge, governments are hiking taxes on gambling in hopes of disincentivizing gambling and raising revenues.
Pretoria has proposed a national 20 percent tax on online gambling profits.
It says the measure would more than double revenues from the sector to $607 million annually.
But betting firms are lobbying hard against it.
The CEO of the South African Bookmaker’s Association, an industry group, estimated that taking into account provincial and other taxes, the levy would be closer to 40 percent.
He warned it would drive gamblers toward illegal gambling hubs, and said it would be more effective to crack down on illegal gambling sites.
There are those who doubt that raising taxes will sufficiently treat the harms of addiction.
Debt-ridden Senegal announced additional gambling taxation in its economic recovery plan last year.
A gambling addict in Dakar, who asked only to be identified by his initials, I.A., said the pastime had driven him to desperation.
“I often feel bad because what hurts me is knowing how hard I work, the difficulty of my job, and I take all that money and bet it on games that I lose. It hurts because it’s only after losing that I realize what I’ve done. Working for hours and then betting that money only to lose it in no time, it really hurts me, seriously.”
Seydina Mohamed Moustapha Gueye is the head of a Senegalese association that organizes meetings for gambling addicts.
He told Reuters the tax is being presented as a response to addiction, but said “today we all agree that we cannot treat or cure addiction through taxation.”

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