A mansion on a privately owned estate, luxury homes in rural villages and in security estates, top-of-the-range vehicles, foreign currency purchases, exotic holidays — and even school fees.

All have this in common: a years-long investigation by news agency GroundUp and the Limpopo Mirror into the National Lotteries Commission (NLC) has revealed that all these items were paid for by multimillion-rand lottery grants meant to uplift the poor...