Tearing Down the Evil Empire of Global Betting

As The Common Sense has reported, the global betting industry is stripping R75 billion a year out of some of South Africa’s poorest families, leaving a trail of malnourished children, alcoholism, family violence, crime, and broken homes in its wake. Entire communities are being drained of their meagre incomes by an industry that packages exploitation as entertainment and addiction as ambition.

At this newspaper we think that if the new Government of National Unity (GNU) seeks a foreign policy cause that reaffirms South Africa’s global moral leadership, it should lead a new global campaign across every platform it commands, from the United Nations to the World Health Organisation, for a global ban on commercial betting.

The global gambling trade has become an evil empire, cloaked in digital glamour but built on human despair. It profits by weaponising addiction and false hope, turning ordinary citizens into sources of endless revenue. In South Africa, betting outlets and online platforms now outnumber libraries and youth centres in many towns. They prey on the poor, the unemployed, and the young, selling illusion as opportunity. Each losing ticket is another household sliding deeper into debt.

The economic costs are profound. Billions that could fund education, healthcare, or small enterprise are siphoned into betting platforms, many owned offshore. The result is a silent wealth transfer from the vulnerable to the already powerful. Gambling replaces the ethic of work with the fantasy of luck. It corrodes the habits of saving, investment, and enterprise that any stable economy requires.

The social consequences run deeper still. Gambling addiction shatters homes, feeding cycles of deceit, crime, and despair. The omnipresent advertising, on screens, in sport, and across social media, makes vice look aspirational and financial recklessness seem normal. Each glossy campaign hides a chain of wrecked families, broken trust, and children growing up in the shadow of debt.

Even the political sphere is not immune. The gambling lobby spends lavishly to shape legislation and resist reform. Governments, addicted to betting tax revenues, become complicit in perpetuating the very misery they should be preventing.

South Africa’s history gives it both the credibility and the moral duty to act. The country that once championed the cause of human dignity should now lead a global movement to dismantle the betting empire that undermines it. Just as the world outlawed slavery, child labour, and the trade in narcotics, so too must it outlaw gambling as an organised system of human degradation.

This is not moral puritanism but moral clarity. A world that values dignity cannot continue to tolerate an industry that profits from despair. If South Africa’s GNU wants to show that principle still matters in global affairs, it should begin by pressing for the abolition of the global betting industry—an act of justice that would protect millions and restore meaning to the country’s claim to moral leadership.