The National Lottery was introduced to South Africa on 11 March 2000. At the time, it was run by Uthingo.
A marketing campaign in South Africa aimed to sell 800,000 tickets on its first day of availability. After three weeks, nearly R7 billion worth of tickets were sold.
19 years ago a Kenyan product promoter came up with the idea to create a daily lottery. His Keno hope, however, was rejected by the trade and industry ministry of Kenya in March 2003.
LottoPlus was launched in November 2003, acting as a weekly lottery that is available for purchase on the purchase of lottery tickets. It offers an entry fee of R1 and has risen to great success.
In July 2006, the Gidani consortium, featuring Greek company Intralot as a technical partner was chosen from among the competing bidders to operate the lottery for seven years starting in April 2007. The operating license was awarded in October 2006.
Pretoria High Court set a precedent by finding a case where the bidding consortium that was awarded rights to build a stadium in 2007 failed to adequately investigate their shareholders. This leads them to believe there may be conflicts of interest.
The draw by incumbent Uthingo in April 2007 had suspended the lottery indefinitely. However, after a while and after many protests, Gidani got their operating licence in September 2007.
In October, tickets re-opened for the show for 250 + minutes and over 200,000 were sold within 72 hours. Initially, Gidani thought to have scratch cards but they were discontinued after losing their license to Ithuba.
In 2015, Lotto licences were awarded to ITHUBA. In 2015, 2 new games were introduced by Ithuba: EAZiWIN, an instant win game comprising four types of indigenous-inspired games; Morabaraba, Fafi Fortune, 4 Siya Wina and Popa Feela and PowerBall Plus.
In December 2020, there were two everyday Powerball tickets and one line of numbers that formed the contest number which in this case was “10”. There was an evening drawing with 20 winners but it later came under fire for corruption or collusion due to the special number sequence.
