Daily Maverick  | 02 October 2024 | Siyabonga Goni 

According to the National Lotteries Commissioner Jodi Scholtz, National Lotteries Commission (NLC) staff members were dismissed from their employment by the previous NLC board after blowing the whistle on corruption.

“Some individuals were really affected very negatively by this … This is really painful. I met a couple of these individuals. It was just so heart-wrenching that their whole lives have been turned upside down,” said Scholtz.

Scholtz revealed that the NLC board is feeling sorry for what happened to these individuals that were dismissed and has “written to some of these individuals that we are aware of, and we are now engaged in the process of them either sharing their stories, capturing it, and then determining what it is,” said Scholtz.

Currently, there are about five or six individuals that the NLC has communicated with and Scholtz believes that more individuals could come forward.

Reparation process

Explaining the reparations process and matter of payments, Scholtz told Daily Maverick that the company will make non-disclosure agreements with whistle-blowers because “people hear the NLC and they think we’re sitting on a pot of money”.

According to Scholtz, the reparation process will start internally, and previous staff members will be speaking with the NLC board, explaining how they were wronged and affected. The board will offer its apologies to the affected employees. 

Following the internal process, there will be an external process, where the NLC will engage with communities that were affected when the NLC conducted projects that collapsed in communities after money was looted, leaving buildings now being vandalised.

One example is the South African Youth Movement (SAYM), which received R20-million from the NLC to build an old age home in the rural Free State in 2017. The facility never opened.

View article on the Daily Maverick website here.