With my professional background in aviation, horse racing operations and sports pools, I’m accustomed to working in highly regulated, operations-heavy sectors. But setting up a national lottery? That’s on a whole other level.
Right now, the team is sprinting towards our 1 June 2026 National Lottery launch date, for which much has to be in place to ensure a seamless transition from the outgoing operator, Ithuba, to us on that day. But our expert team, comprising local and international gaming, technology and finance specialists, is methodically making it happen.
We have little dependency on Ithuba, other than data transfer. Effectively, we’re starting completely from scratch: a brand-new, fully fledged company that has to go completely operational nationwide just after the stroke of midnight on Monday, 1 June. Everything – our retail terminals, our tech back end, our operations centre, our games – has to be in place and working perfectly. No delays, no excuses.
Not only that, we’re not just offering what’s available now: we’re introducing new games and rolling out fresh, easier ways for our nation to play the lottery, in more places than ever before. As it should, the lottery is finally extending its reach to the furthest, most remote corners of our country.
To do this we’re partnering with thousands of retailers, from the kinds of places where we can already play the lottery now to small spaza shops. We will support them with signage and upgraded shopfitting to improve the playing experience, reinforcing the value of their association with the National Lottery and positioning accredited retailers as ambassadors of our “lottery for South Africans” ethos.
Vetting, identifying and concluding agreements with them, and of course building solid, trust-based relationships, is thus one of our priorities; success has to be mutual for the lottery to work, and for us to support social upliftment and cohesion for South Africans.
We’re also introducing not one, but three kinds of terminals, designed to meet the diverse needs of retailers. At the beginning of March we reached a milestone in rolling out the terminals to our retailers, giving both our team and the retailers sufficient time to adjust to the new system.
They need to be trained on the terminals and the games we’ll be offering, so we’re creating a support structure for them: our “nerve centre”, the operations centre that is the very backbone of our operation and the point of contact for retailers, players and people in the field.
Furthermore, we have to ensure that the banking sector is fully on board with our new system, interface and products. It goes without saying that this is another critically important element of the strategy; without the banks, we’re nowhere.
And we have to do all this while Ithuba continues to operate the current lottery. Our mission is to respect and uphold the National Lottery as a public institution, and we will manage the transition to avoid disruption to the incumbent and prevent any confusion among the public. This will ensure continuity, operational integrity and public confidence throughout.
Easily the most exciting thing about taking over the National Lottery is that we’re bringing back one of its most important and trusted elements: live lottery draws. Not since 2017, when draws moved to a digital, random number generator (RNG), have South Africans been able to watch the numbered balls be selected, ticket in hand and heart in mouth.
Not only will live draws do much to reinstate public faith in the lottery process (there has been widespread, ongoing scepticism of the RNG method’s fairness), they will inject much-needed anticipation and excitement into playing the lottery again. There’s no substitute for the intensity of a lotto draw: the visual immediacy of the draw machines, the kinetic motion of the numbered balls in the drum, and the moment of selection as each ball is drawn in real time all contribute to a transparent and credible process.
This stands in marked contrast to the purely transactional validation of a ticket at a retail terminal, hoping to hear that ersatz winner’s trumpet call; it cannot replicate the same level of engagement or public assurance. We’ll be focused on preserving and enhancing the live draw experience as a central feature of player engagement and confidence.
Four times a week (twice each for the LOTTO and POWERBALL games), players will once again be able to watch the draws as they happen on their TVs, from the comfort of their homes. And the first Powerball draw is on 2 June, the day after Sizekhaya takes over operations.
Sizekhaya is isiZulu for “coming home”. We’re aiming to do exactly that: make people feel at home with the South African National Lottery, no matter where they access it in our beautiful country – be it in a shopping mall in Centurion, in a spaza shop in rural Eastern Cape or on an app on their couch. We’re bringing the lottery back into people’s lives, and into their homes. It’s coming.
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Fundi Sithebe’s early career spanned banking, management consulting and the FIFA 2010 World Cup South Africa. More recently, she has acted as the chief operating officer and acting CEO of the Airports Company South Africa. As CEO of 4Racing, she became the first black woman to lead a major horse racing organisation in South Africa. In 2022 she was elected to the board of the World Tote Association, a post she held for three years. She is currently the Chief Operating Officer of Sizekhaya Holdings, which will operate the National Lottery from 1 June 2026
