Horse racing has an age gap probem

THE Western Cape Gambling and Racing Board is investigating ways to get younger people to participate in horse betting as the board’s coffers continue to dwindle.

The board’s CEO, Primo Abrahams, revealed in the 2021/2022 annual report horse betting as a sport had been struggling.

The board has also been criticised by opposition parties in the Western Cape Provincial Parliament for its dependency on state funds.

“Horse racing as a sport has been struggling, both financially and in terms of attracting interest in the sport for betting purposes,” Abrahams said.

He said the board had noticed a substantial decline in betting taxes for this contingency over the past few years, both in terms of tote betting (open bets) and fixed odds betting.

“Re-invigoration of horse racing as a sport is necessary to make it more appealing to the younger generation, which could assist in bringing a turnaround in this industry.”

Reporting on the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the board’s coffers, Abrahams reported that R777 million in gambling taxes had been collected, compared to R481m collected in the previous financial year.

These were provincial taxes in casinos, horse racing, and betting, as well as limited payout machines.

Meanwhile, the board is also facing a number of risks, including the ability to perform its mandate, due to undue interference.

According to the report, the board could also be rendered ineffective due to the snail’s pace of filling vacancies.

The entity’s ability to perform its mandate could also be threatened by the decline in statutory fees collected from licensed operators that retrench staff or migrate to other provinces.

Also, the racing and gambling board’s mandate could be threatened by undue influence by the parent department.

These were some of the governance risks listed in the board’s 2021/2022 annual report, which was debated this week in the Western Cape legislature’s economic development and opportunities portfolio committee.

Alarm bells have also been sounded over a decline in revenue despite the entity collecting more than R79m in income from several sources.

In the period under review and also during the year under review, there were 68 allegations of illegal gambling, with the board fully investing in 67. One was in the process of being investigated as of March 31, 2022.

Of the allegations investigated, 30 were confirmed to be illegal, and 37 were confirmed to be legal.

ANC MPL Nomi Nkondlo said the party was concerned the board was yet to be self-sustainable.

“We understand that the DA speaks about alcohol harm, but it has not done the same in as far as gambling harm,” Nkondlo said. GOD help us when, not if, there is another infectious disease outbreak on the scale of Covid-19.

The pandemic left in its wake death and fear. Also, anger and alienation.

“Follow the science” was the call of the Covid crusaders. It’s a compelling battle cry, for the foundation of medical progress over centuries has been the eschewing of hunch and belief in favour of the rational pursuit of evidence-based decision-making.

But, as research results and experience accumulated, it became obvious that scientists, doctors, politicians and the media at every step along the way had overstated the strength of the evidence on which they were making life-changing policy decisions. These elisions, exaggerations and downright lies – as well as the suppression of contradictory information – were being done supposedly with the best of intentions. In fact, their actions often visited substantial harm on those in whose best interests they were ostensibly serving. No wonder that the result has been bitterness, distrust and fury. What is now needed, writes Emily Oster, an economist at Brown University, is amnesty. Writing in The Atlantic, Oster this week penned an earnest plea for the combatants “to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about Covid”. Oster makes the reasonable point that, for a long time, there were only “glimmers of information”. Life-changing choices had to be made urgently under conditions of great uncertainty. She argues that the missteps that followed did not stem from nefarious intent but were made by people “who were working in earnest for the good of society”.

“Treating pandemic choices as a scorecard is preventing us from moving forward. We have to put these fights aside and declare a pandemic amnesty,” she writes. Fat chance of that. Few people, especially not those who warned of medical over-confidence, pharmaceutical greed and governmental over-reach, are in any mood to forgive and forget.

The National Review’s Michael Brendan Dougherty writes that “forget everything, learn nothing” is a bad way to ensure institutional accountability. “We need to understand what role conscious deception (noble lying) plays in public-health messaging. We should investigate it precisely because, while it didn’t accomplish its ends, it did inspire a backlash.”

Mary Harrington, an editor at UnHerd, writes that no “amnesty” is possible without an acknowledgement of wrongdoing. “Those who drove Covid policy presented themselves not just as people doing their best, but as the sole bearers of rational truth and life-saving moral authority.

“We all knew every pandemic policy would come with trade-offs, (but) the priesthood forbade any discussion of those trade-offs. No amnesty will be possible that doesn’t acknowledge the class politics, the corruption of the scientific process, the self-dealing,

ANDREW INGRAM EFFORTS are being made to give horse betting an appeal for younger people. |