Lotto thieves must be prosecuted

It is gratifying to hear that the Commissioner of the National Lotteries Commission (NLC), Thabang Charlotte Mampane, has resigned “with immediate effect”.

But it is less cheering that she only left her lucrative position with a few weeks left on her contract.

Mampane served 10 years as commissioner – effectively chief executive officer of the NLC.

Her first five year contract was extended in September 2017. During that time, the whole National Lotteries structure has been systematically looted and hundreds of millions of rand intended to uplift the poor and the suffering has been diverted to an evil network of money-suckers.

Her resignation comes just over two weeks after we, and others in the media, revealed that Lottery funding meant to build a Limpopo school razed by fire during a protest, had been used to pay for her luxury home in a golf estate.

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The house, in the upmarket Pecanwood Estate, is registered in the name of a trust in which Mampane and her husband, Samuel, are both trustees.

The couple and their two adult children are all beneficiaries of the trust. The house is but the tip of a very ugly iceberg of blatant theft which began after the government revised lottery legislation some years ago, to allow the NLC to “pro-actively” fund projects rather than waiting for applications.

This resulted in a wholesale diversion of funds to the looting network, which sometimes used deserving causes as a front. To say what happened at the NLC is despicable is an understatement.

The missing millions could have helped people in need – and a house at Pecanwood Estate for an already highly paid apparatchik doesn’t meet the criteria of need in any social work handbook we’re aware of.

Hats off to investigative journalist Raymond Joseph of GroundUp for bringing this malfeasance to light. We await the prosecutions..