Three candidates recommended for Lottery chair

A parliamentary portfolio committee has recommended three candidates to replace NLC board chair Barney Pityana. Archive photo: Ashraf Hendricks

Three people have been recommended to chair the National Lotteries Commission (NLC).

Parliament’s portfolio committee on trade, industry and competition, which oversees the lottery, has recommended King Tembinkosi Bonakele, Mpho Mosing and Lufono Toyko Nevondwe for the key post.

The committee spent Tuesday interviewing shortlisted candidates. A report will now be sent to the Speaker to be tabled before and approved by the National Assembly.

The names will then be submitted to Minister Parks Tau to decide which of the three he will appoint.

The current chair is Barney Pityana, who quit recently at the age of 80, with two years of his five-year tenure left. Pityana agreed to stay on until his successor was appointed.

It is highly unlikely that a decision will be made this year, as Parliament goes into recess at the end of this week after its final plenary session for 2025. The earliest it will be tabled before Parliament is in February 2026.

The three recommended candidates are:

• King Tembinkosi Bonakele is a current member of the NLC board. He has been a lawyer for 18 years, nine of which he served as a Commissioner of the Competition Commission of South Africa. He also holds an MBA. He scored 89 out of 100 points in the interview process.
• Mpho Mosing is a former chair of the audit and risk committee of the State Diamonds Trader and a former member of the Gauteng Liquor Board’s commission of inquiry into fraud and governance controls. She scored 71 points.
• Lufuno Toyko Nevondwe is an advocate and the current chairperson of the independent trust responsible for safeguarding lottery funds on behalf of its beneficiaries. He is also currently a board member of the Film and Publication Board and the South African National Space Agency. He scored 69 points.

Tau is not required to choose the candidate with the highest score.

The 2022 interview process (through which Pityana was ultimately appointed chair) was an acrimonious stop-start process with long delays, and regularly degenerated into a war of words between the ANC and the DA. It was beset with litigation and acrimony as relations between then minister Ebrahim Patel and the NLC board soured.

But an MP involved in this year’s deliberations described them as “collegial”.

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