South Africa Attempting to Regulate Online Poker Markets

Legislation of online poker has been all the rage over the past several years in European countries. From Italy, Spain and France all the way to Croatia, Bulgaria and Gibraltar, the countries in Europe are attempting to regulate their gambling markets to protect their citizens as well as fill the national coffers. While poker is not big in all of Africa, the South Africa is an exception, with over 250,000 online gamblers many of which enjoy jumping into an occasional game of poker.

The South African laws allowed the state to issue gambling licenses to online operators in the country in the National Gambling Amendment of 2008. This Amendment basically made online poker legal, but not a single license was granted since. The opponents of online gambling have had a go at it in 2010 in the Casino Enterprises (PTY) Ltd -v.- the Gauteng Gambling Board which banned a brick and mortar casino from offering online services.

According to this verdict the online gambling providers who are not regulated in South Africa are not allowed to offer their services to South African citizens. Other then several online sports books that are regulated by the state there are currently no online gambling sites operating in the country.

Online gambling regulation always has a champion, and in the case of South Africa this champion is the Minister for Trade and Industry, Geordin Hill-Lewis. Lewis has introduced the 2014 Remote Gambling Act which intends to regulate the online markets and make a safe gambling enviorement while not antagonizing the brick and mortar establishments.

The act proposes that the individual South African provinces (of which there are 9) would issue the licenses while a National Gambling Board would make sure they all complied to the bill. The bill has been amended to include further provisions on safe gambling and will hopefully see progress up the elusive chain of governance in February when the parliament will reconvene.

South Africa has been facing the problems of addictive gambling and its inability to enforce its laws on online gambling for a number of years. Past attempts were made to prohibit online gambling altogether to limit the problem gambling but this ban could not be enforced by the government. While South African government remains unable to prohibit foreign gambling operators from offering services to its citizens, those operators continue to offer customers better deals then they could get even in a regulated local market.

We will continue to monitor the advancement of Hill-Lewis’s Act and will keep you posted as the whole thing advances. Hopefully by the end of the year South Africans will be able to exercise their right to gamble responsibly from the comfort of their homes.