In a world of desperate financial jugglers, a greater social crisis emerges
Just over 23 years ago, Rayda Jacobs published her seminal novel Confessions of a Gambler. The book tracked the descent of an ordinary, religious family woman from Cape Town into a gambling habit and ultimately addiction. The beginning of her gambling journey was borne not out if desperation but an accidental visit to a casino on a day trip with friends where she played for fun and won which triggered a desire to go back.
As such stories tend to go; the habit became and addiction and the losses more frequent than wins; and with every loss, the belief that the next trip would result in a windfall to cover all accumulated losses became the constant pull.
I was reminded of this book during the publication of the 2026 Old Mutual Savings and Investment Monitor where the financial trends, patterns and habits of employed South Africans between the age of 18 and 65 are tracked on an annual basis. In a country where unemployment is rife and access to opportunities elusive; very few citizens are fortunate enough to be employed. According to SARS, just over 7 million citizens earn enough income to meet the R96 000 threshold of paying income tax. In a country of 63 million, such numbers are truly disturbing. The problem is that even within this population group of the relatively fortunate, serious challenges relating to debt management, poor savings and escalating demands persist.
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According to Old Mutual, lower income earners are facing significant financial strain and habits of desperation have become entrenched. These include the practice of ‘debit order olympics’ where individuals move money ‘fast fast’ to escape debit order deductions or simply stop depositing money in order to avoid it being swallowed by debit orders.
Whilst this comes with consequences like bank charges for bounced debit orders, the survey indicates that this is borne out of affordability pressures and cash flow squeezes. As one would expect, this is more acute amongst low-income earners (53%) and younger people (56%). Such practices are usually not once off and one month of debit order shuffling leads to another month of more shuffling.
Under this dimension of desperation, the attraction for a quick fix like gambling is easy to extrapolate. Whilst motivations for gambling can vary from the fun and entertainment fix to a committed habit; it is alarming to see so many people stating that they gambled as a way of making extra money. Over the past 2 years, the incidence of working South Africans using gambling as a means to manage expenses sits at 42%.
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This is mapped against the gambling rate of 53% across the respondents. The obvious problem with this development is that gambling generates notoriously poor returns for punters and gambling houses have a stellar track record of being the ultimate winners on an aggregate basis. The addictive nature of gambling is that far too many punters labour under the belief that they are one card shuffle and one heartbeat away from a major windfall. That provides a higher risk of overspending what little they do have in the hope of a large windfall. As expected, the percentage of those who find themselves in financial difficulties as a result of gambling is increasing.
The rise in online gambling platforms in recent years has created a much noisier ecosystem where everywhere you look, gambling promotions are being casually socialised. In addition to the confrontation through aggressive advertising, subtle advertising channels like WhatsApp or SMS and starter vouchers from betting companies drive the rise in gambling promotion. This means almost everyone is targeted and eventually, some vulnerable citizens catch the bait. Unsurprisingly, over 65% of the respondents gamble at least once a week with 10% gambling every day.
When one considers the social risks associated with gambling addiction, we need to be vigilant about what such trends reflect. When we know so many citizens are financially vulnerable and the proximity to gambling opportunities is increasing, we may be living through an escalating social crisis whose effects will eventually explode.
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Whilst we may not solve the crisis of unemployment, low incomes and cost of living squeezes overnight, we cannot afford to ignore the looming shadow of the gambling crisis. Old Mutual observes that we are indeed a nation of divergent financial realities; and a nation that is financially fragile. I think we need to be wary of that fragility translating into a social catastrophe fuelled by the gambling epidemic. The question now, is how do we translate such reflections into proactive policy solutions before we lose a generation of citizens driven to despair and ruin by the fragility we all now acknowledge and understand.
Written by Khaya Sithole, an accountant, activist, and academic