Trust Was the Product. The First 100 Days Say it Sold

Sizekhaya’s first 100 days are a business story, and not a marketing slogan. On 1 June 2026 the Sizekhaya consortium took over operations at South Africa's National Lottery from Ithuba Holdings after an 11-year run and a really messy last year. One hundred days later the draws are live again, the prize pool is moving, and players have answered with their wallets. And that is ultimately the test that matters.

Trust Erosion and Transparency Glazed Over

The backdrop is trust, and trust had been leaking for years. Ithuba grew ticket sales and paid large jackpots. Over 11 years it recorded about R74 billion in sales, more than R36 billion in prizes and more than R17.5 billion for good causes. The institution built around it to support and grow the national lottery, however, did not keep pace. Grant abuse at the National Lotteries Commission, while a regulator problem rather than an operator one, further stained every ticket. 

On the operator side the public experience disintegrated in plainer ways. Draws were recorded and uploaded rather than shown live, which left a gap in which suspicion could sit. A June 2025 switch to a new retail system left terminals slow or dead. The final licence year was itself controversial: a temporary extension that courts had already found tilted toward the incumbent. 

Handover Headaches

Then the handover happened. Historic prize files arrived with missing draw data, incomplete fields and payment-status clashes. Valid claims from the last days of May were delayed while the new operator had to cleaned the records. Ithuba said it had supplied what was required. Players experienced the gap. A lottery that cannot show its numbers, or pay yesterday’s winners without a quarrel, loses turnover before it loses the argument.

Building Back Trust, Interest and Innovation

Ask any major brand that has landed on the wrong side of public opinion and you will hear of despair and often doors closing. In Sizekhaya’s case it was that the repair had to be highly visible. Chief lottery officer Juan del Valle told a media briefing this week that research had been blunt: many players do not trust a number that arrives through a screen they cannot see. 

The company spent heavily to put the draw back on television. Balls are weighed and measured. Machines are sealed and filmed. The National Lotteries Commission and external auditors sit in the room. Numbers are entered on two systems and must match, then checked again to the cent. Results stay provisional until that sign-off. A visible on-air mishap early in the draws, far from being a failure, was treated as proof that the draw is not arranged in advance. Five minutes of television sit on top of a process that starts hours earlier. That is the product, and one that is earning back trust.

Powerball Cascade - Bringing Back Players

The other major innovation in the product change is the Powerball cascade. If a jackpot is not won in the top division it steps down until someone wins. On this week Tuesday’s PowerBall Xtra the pool was not taken at the top. It landed on players who matched four numbers plus the bonus ball. Fifteen of them shared an estimated R21 million, a prize of around R1.39 million each. 

The new rule does not invent new money. The prize fund remains a fixed share of sales, about 52 percent. It redistributes that share so a dead jackpot does not roll on forever while casual players conclude the game is closed to them. Marketing head Kgothatso Mashile called it a first for this lottery. The line that irritated social media, that everyone keeps winning, was intentional. It is also easy to over-read. Most wins are small. The point is that the top prize no longer vanishes into the next week by default.

What the Scorecard Says

The early scorecard is volume. In the first three months Sizekhaya recorded 12,112,325 winners across PowerBall, PowerBall Xtra, Lotto Plus 1 and Lotto 5 Max, sharing R1.075 billion. A KwaZulu-Natal player took a R128 million win within 72 hours. Three PowerBall Plus winners took more than R45.7 million each. A Gauteng Lotto ticket paid R69 million, another Lotto ticket R20 million, and a Soweto PowerBall ticket paid R93.5 million. Chief operating officer Fundi Sithebe said a new operator usually sees a lull. This one did not. Banking apps kept selling through the cutover. The first month, the company says, ran ahead of the same period a year earlier. 

Retail was the hard rebuild: new terminals had to be rolled out, a Genlot central system, and bank interfaces built and tested, and assembled while the old operator was still trading. About 6,500 terminals are active, with a wider roll-out still short in outlying towns. Scratch cards and USSD play are back in play. Historic claims have also been reconciled so pre-June tickets can be paid. Scorecard is looking positive.

Thin Margins on Massive Volumes

None of the operator work and investment is a charity. Goldrush, the largest private shareholder at 40 percent after the state took its 20 percent, has said a competent operator should make a low to mid-single-digit margin on sales lately running above R6.5 billion a year. The first year is targeted to recover terminals and set-up costs. The remaining years are the dividend. Only PowerBall tickets moved up in price, to R10. Other games stay in a band from about R2 to R5 per line. The stated aim is a wider base, not a heavier take from the same people, with spend caps implemented at banks and retailers. Miss the promises in the bid and the regulator can penalise the operator adding another layer of slimming margins for the operator. Thin margins on a contractual flow of this size are still a business, and with the market responding to innovations - a valuable one. 

Unpicking The Political Pitch

The political noise around the bid members is quite simply a stretch, and it has crowded out the operating story. The Lotteries Act bars political parties and political office-bearers from a direct or indirect financial interest. Sizekhaya says no elected official sits in the consortium. Shareholders went through the company’s own checks, the commission’s, and the minister’s. A family connection by marriage in a minority vehicle is not a seat in Cabinet, and it is not evidence that the licence was awarded outside the statute. Courts are still hearing a challenge from the losing incumbent. Until a judgment says otherwise, the legal position is the one the award process produced: a licensed operator, a state equity stake through a nominated entity, and private capital that put up the bid cost and the bought the ticket machines.

Selling Tickets - The Rest is Crickets 

What the market has clearly said, in tickets rather than comment, is that the repair is credible enough to play. That matters beyond the consortium. The National Lottery is not a provincial casino tax. A statutory share of every rand goes to the National Lottery Distribution Trust Fund for sport, arts and community work. Since the lottery began, that fund has put more than R30 billion into those causes. It remains one of the largest dedicated philanthropic flows in the country. Online gambling is a separate and legitimate worry. A regulated draw, with a published split, a live audit trail and a fund that does not disappear into a provincial budget, is the instrument that has actually paid for club fields, arts projects and welfare programmes at national scale. Defending that instrument is not the same as cheering every bet.

One hundred days does not close the NLC’s older cases that are slowly progressing hopefully to prossecutions, and they do not make an eight-year licence immortal. They do however show a team that took the game in hand, and treated distrust as an operating problem and solved it : show the balls, pay the old tickets, put terminals back in the townships, and let a missed jackpot still land on someone or many. Players have so far said yes. For a business whose only real asset is belief, that is the result that counts.