SABA says South Africa’s illegal gambling fight is still at the advocacy stage despite legislative proposals

South Africa’s Bookmakers’ Association has put six legislative interventions on the table to tackle illegal offshore gambling, but CEO Sean Coleman says the process is still “largely within the advocacy and stakeholder engagement phase.” For PSPs, acquirers and banks, the useful bit is that the debate is now explicitly touching payment systems, financial intelligence and regulator coordination, not just gambling licensing.

1. Coleman told iGB that SABA’s recent statement was meant to shape policy discussion, not to signal imminent legal changes. “The publication of our statement was intended to contribute constructively to what we believe is an increasingly important national policy discussion rather than to suggest that legislative amendments are imminent,” he said.
2. The July statement proposed six legislative interventions across the National Gambling Act, the Electronic Communications Act and the Financial Intelligence Centre Act, plus coordinated action from the Reserve Bank and other regulators. That matters because SABA is not framing this as a pure gambling-law problem; it is also trying to pull in communications enforcement and payment rails.
3. The association cited a Yield Sec report estimating that illegal operators account for roughly 62% of all online gambling activity in South Africa, diverting more than R50 billion in gross gambling revenue offshore each year. The same report said around 16 million South Africans had used illegal platforms in the past year.
4. One area where SABA sees momentum is the National Gambling Board’s call for expressions of interest from service providers that can monitor, block, track and report illegal gambling websites. The tender was published on 30 June, with submissions due by 7 August 2026, but Coleman said SABA had not received any operational timelines or implementation details beyond the public notice.
5. Coleman also pushed back on the idea that website blocking alone will solve the problem, saying the proposed reforms touch gambling regulation, electronic communications, payment systems and financial intelligence legislation. In practice, that means anyone processing for this market should read the debate as a multi-agency enforcement effort rather than a single regulator pressing one button.

For high-risk PSPs, the key takeaway is not that South Africa has moved into enforcement. It has not. The point is that the policy discussion is broadening to include the payment layer, which is usually where offshore gambling gets messy in the first place.