The National Lottery Commission was involved in massive corruption.Illustration: Lisa Nelson
TimesLIVE editor and Sunday Times deputy editor Makudu Sefara wrote an article attacking GroundUp and Lottery reporter Raymond Joseph in response to an article published last year. But he fails to address our central point: that the Sunday World, which he edited, received an inexplicably large amount of lottery money and wrote pro-lottery articles.
Mr. Sephara edited Sunday World in 2019 and 2020. He previously served as spokesperson for fugitive from justice “prophet” Shepherd Bushiri and editor of The Star and Sunday Independent. After Sunday World, he joined Times Live. He currently serves on the management committee of the South African National Editors Forum (SANEF).
There's so much diversionary noise in Sephala's 3,000-word article that it's easy to lose sight of the important issues. Sunday World receives significant amounts of media funding from the National Lotteries Commission (NLC) (which was noted by the Auditor General as irregular). Around the same time, Sunday World published a series of propaganda articles in support of the NLC.
Joseph, along with Anton van Zyl, elaborated on this in a report published by GroundUp on August 3, 2023, titled 'Exposed: Sunday World and Lottery's lucrative partnership'.
Since 2018, GroundUp has been exposing corruption at the NLC. Joseph is the lead reporter for this article. For this work, he won almost every major journalism award in the country. The majority of his 230-plus articles on the lottery expose corruption, but he has yet to flag any serious, serious mistakes. Lawsuits and Ombud charges against us by those we exposed have collapsed or been dismissed.
Lottery corruption was one of the worst examples of state capture. We exposed hundreds of millions of rands of misappropriated funds. There was so much corruption that what we reported was only a fraction of what happened. The actual amount stolen was probably in the billions of rands.
But the story has taken a turn for the better. The worst offenders in Lottery management and its board of directors had to move on or be punished. The Special Investigation Department froze the assets and took measures against the lottery thieves. The new board of directors and management recognized the seriousness of the situation and worked to bring the situation under control. They seem serious.
sunday world scandal
Herein lies the crux of Sunday World's unethical conduct. See the original article for more information.
In 2021, NLC spent 46% of its media budget on Sunday World. However, the paper's average weekly circulation was less than 32,000 copies. By comparison, even though News24 is the country's largest news site, the Sunday Times had an average weekly circulation of over 117,303 copies and, like Media24, captured about 1% of NLC's media spend. Over the three years from 2020 to 2022, Sunday World received R24.7 million in advertising fees from the NLC. No rational explanation for this has ever been provided.
Below is an example of how the Sunday World reported lottery propaganda as news.
Several people have raised concerns with SANEF about this matter. For example, former journalism professor Anton Haber wrote a formal complaint to SANEF. We raised this issue at the SANEF meeting. What is needed is an independent investigation into the relationship between Sunday World and the NLC.
It is natural for us journalists to be quick to denounce perceived threats to media freedom. However, we also need to address credible allegations of corruption within our ranks, especially following the extremely serious findings in 2021 of the SANEF-commissioned Media Credibility and Ethics Inquiry. However, we need to take action.
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