Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
‘Grace of God kept lottery going’
THE NATIONAL Lotteries Board had been surviving “by the Grace of God” when chairman Alfred Nevhutanda and his new board took over in 2009, Parliament heard this week.
Nevhutanda was addressing the portfolio committee on Trade and Industry, which is conducting public hearings on the Lotteries Amendments Bill, on Wednesday.
He was discussing ways in which the board had improved efficiency in dealing with applications for funding.
“There were no systems in place. How it was surviving, I don’t know. There was no management, just a chief executive and a chief operating officer. There was no company secretary,” he said as he detailed the organisation he had taken over.
He also described finding funding applications dating back as far as 2001, and then attempting to track down the organisations to see whether they still existed. He also recalled pushing “a kind of a wheelbarrow full of about 1 000 files”, each one requiring just one phone call to request a cancelled cheque, before they could be finalised.
The board has, for a number of years, come under heavy fire from NGOs and the government for the slow pace of disbursing millions of rand in lottery funding to needy organisations.
Nevhutanda said that after implementing changes – which included hiring more management, an SMS system, and opening up the office of the chairman so that people could raise their concerns – the turnaround time on applications was now about 90 days.
Meanwhile, Zodwa Ntuli, the Department of Trade and Industry’s deputy director-general in the consumer and corporate regulation division, revealed that, at its worst, applications for funding for good causes took longer than two years just to get a “yes” or “no” response.
At one point the organisation didn’t even have its own scanning facilities, and documents and files were being sent to a contracted company for scanning, she said.
Nevhutanda said there were now employees requesting exit packages because they were not used to the people-driven and efficient ways of working that were being introduced.
Ntuli detailed some of the challenges which the National Lotteries Board faced – issues of long waiting periods, funds not reaching the intended beneficiaries, and high numbers of applications being declined owing to highly complex application procedures.
Ntuli said that about 60 percent of applications were declined. Many of the strict requirements were written into the current Lotteries Act, which made it impossible to remove them from the application form until the act had been amended.
She said the new proposed guidelines, which had different application processes depending on the amount of money being requested, would help alleviate some of the pressures.
Detailing the process of applying for funding, Ntuli also pointed out that there were areas causing delays at almost every step, such as the signing of grant agreements and payment of funds.
This, she said, had little to do with the legal framework, and more to do with administration problems.
Public submissions on the bill are now complete, and the committee has started its deliberations.