A five-year war has been raging between the National Lotteries Commission (NLC) and investigative journalist Ray Joseph. It is a story that tells us much about investigative reporting, data journalism, the importance of non-profit media and what might be happening in our national lottery.
Joseph is well known among journalists for his passion, doggedness, thick skin and almost 50 years of experience. He has published a stream of stories that have collectively drawn a picture of the body that controls our lotteries as a centre of self-enrichment, corruption and wastage.
The NLC licenses and regulates lotteries, and manages the programme to distribute the proceeds to “good causes”. In other words, it has a lot of power and a lot of money to hand out.
But the headlines on Joseph’s stories tell a tale: “Lottery money goes to waste as school falls apart”; “Lottery-funded rehab centre unfinished after two years”; “How a lawyer used a Lottery-funded project as his personal ATM”; “The Lottery CEO and the mysterious payments”; “Lottery paid millions of rand to COO’s wife’s company” ... You get the idea: evidence of malfeasance building up like water against a leaky dam.
Joseph’s story started at the African Investigative Journalism Conference of 2016, when a disparate group of reporters planned a cross-border, collaborative investigation. They agreed to each dig into their national lotteries and share their learnings. (Full disclosure: I convene the conference and the Henry Nxumalo Foundation, which gave a grant for this investigation.)
With data journalism’s civic tech lab Code for SA (now called OpenUp) they scraped NLC’s reports for 16 years of grantee information and built a tool that made it all available and searchable. “It was like switching on the light in a cellar,” Joseph says, for one could now discern the patterns and delve into recipients. It was a fine example of the value of journalists knowing how to handle large databases and make them accessible.
Joseph also worked closely with Anton van Zyl of the Limpopo Mirror, who did important work in looking at local projects funded by the NLC. Early stories were in the Sunday Times and City Press. “Then they said we had done the Lottery story. But I said we had done a lottery story, not the story.”
For a while, Joseph says he self-funded the work. “But my wife wanted to kill me. I was running up debts.” The editor who picked it up, backed him and stuck with the story was Nathan Geffen from GroundUp, a non-profit that pursues a bottom-up journalism with local, community-based stories. Others republished GroundUp’s work, but no-one else was investigating. “This is the one state capture story that only one outlet is chasing,” Joseph says.
Before I spell out how the NLC has reacted, let me say that it has denied all of the allegations, without providing the evidence to knock them down. It has instituted two court actions against GroundUp and Joseph. Transport minister Fikile Mbalula has also demanded a retraction and R2m compensation for things said about him.
When trade, industry & competition minister Ebrahim Patel commissioned an independent investigation into the allegations, the NLC went to court to try to stop it. It failed, and now the evidence has been handed to the Special Investigating Unit, which raided NLC offices in December 2020.
The first prong of the NLC counterattack was to use its huge advertising budget to discourage outlets from running critical stories. Some of those looking into the stories were told the NLC was thinking about where to spend its money. GroundUp, as a non-profit that does not carry advertising, is one of the few outlets immune from advertisers’ pressure.
The second prong was a legal strategy: lawyers’ letters, demands and summonses. But there were also personal attacks, threats, social media trolling and other forms of harassment. COO Phillemon Letwaba said on television that Joseph was embittered because the commission had stopped funding entities related to him and his family. Joseph denies it and is now suing Letwaba. “I now have to have extraordinary security,” Joseph says.
Joseph is the kind of reporter who responds to such threats by digging further and harder. So, the battle is on. Just this week Joseph wrote another exposé: “Fowl play! Lottery board member received millions linked to Lottery grants.” It is not clear where this will end. Or — like so many corruption sagas — if it will end. But Joseph is not letting go.
NLC spokesperson Ndivhuho Mafela said in response to questions that Joseph had declined an offer to engage directly with the NLC and had adopted “an adversarial posture”.
He said the NLC was working on its system for vetting grantees and had punitive measures in place for those who did not deliver on their contracts with the NLC.
Asked if he could show me evidence to refute Joseph’s reports, he said: “The NLC is on record detailing investigations at different levels in response to serious allegations made”.
Asked about the use of advertising as leverage against critics, he said: “All NLC advertising is in line with performance deliverables ... and public information needs.”
He welcomed the SIU investigation.
• Harber is executive director of the Campaign for Free Expression and Caxton professor of journalism at Wits University.
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