It’s increasingly evident that gamblers in South Africa waiting for legal online poker and casino games will have to vote in a different national government.

Over the past few years, parliamentarian Geordin Hill-Lewis has proposed legislation that would expand the nation’s current online sports betting regime to include poker and casino options. But Hill-Lewis’s Democratic Alliance party remains in opposition and the ruling African National Congress party has shown zero interest in advancing his bills.

This week, the Department of Trade and Industry and the National Gambling Board (NGB) doubled down on their anti-online stance by calling for the development of strategies to prevent unauthorized forms of online gambling from being beamed in from outside the country.

Legislators, regulators, banks, academics and other stakeholders were all in attendance at a seminar in Johannesburg to address how best to combat the problem of illegal online gambling. The Casino Association of South Africa has claimed that illegal online gambling is responsible for at least 5% of the land-based gaming industry’s decline over the past couple years.