By Khalifa Hemed
Published March 23, 2019
It is Saturday morning and you have decided to file an article that says that despite what any one says, Kenya is officially a haven of gamblers.
As you plunge into the subject at hand your cellphone, as if by divine confirmation that the hypotheses of your article is well founded, alerts you to the arrival of a new message. It is from a source whose name you are seeing for the first time in your not-so-short life; SureBets.
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Though the message is both unsolicited and unclear, you can tell you are being invited to send Sh200 to SureBets to stand a chance of winning Sh90000. Not so?
“CONFIRMED
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Welcome to Kenya, the country in which gambling, betting or gaming companies not only sponsor prime time news and popular programmes on television and radio and crowd-pulling sports and social activities but this Bahati Nasibu or Pata-Potea practice is also advertised on billboards and in the newspapers and social media as being the ‘fastest growing industry’ in The East African country whose people take it not as a recreational leisure activity but a major investment opportunity.
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And dear Google, this article is not about promoting gambling in a country ranked as the third largest gambling market in sub-Saharan Africa by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) firm of auditors in 2017, but a journalistic narrative of how the country the British created has come to have the highest number of gambling youth in black Africa, according to a survey by GeoPoll in 2018.
Various surveys on gambling in Kenya show that the entrenchment of betting as a lifestyle here is driven by the easy availability of the mobile phone, mobile money, internet penetration, a large population of zero or low income earners and the allure of winning big on unbelievably low amounts of money (Sh10 or US1Cent!) placed on bets.
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“Low-income earners [who] constitute 54% of Kenya’s population, offer a rich target market for the betting industry,” Njeri Wangari of GeoPoll writes. “he betting industry’s rags-to-riches narrative of poor rural folk holding huge cheques outside their mud huts, and stories of overnight millionaires has continued to resonate with the poor and low-income earners. While our study found that this group bets with amounts as low as KSH 10 – 50, their huge numbers multiply the tiny quantities into millions.”
Njeri Wangari carries on: “About half of low-income gambling consumers are 18-25 years. It is likely that the youth are most involved given the high affinity to mobile phones, sports, and unemployment rates.”
As seven million Kenyans are unemployed and 1.4 million of them have been desperately looking for work according to Kenya National Bureau of Statistics, Wangari concludes that the study by GeoPoll “found that the highest proportion (40%) of the low-income gambling consumer is unemployed, and a third (29%) are students. This shows that a significant percentage of the low-income gambling consumer hope that gambling will turn into a source of income for them.”
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Gambling-related cases of students losing tuition fees, employees being sacked, people committing suicide or going bankrupt, and family break up are being reported across the country.
Yes, the gambling craze is taking root in Kenya, leaving dashed hopes, broken hearts and even death on its trail.
And Kenya’s leaders, in the name of protecting vulnerable citizens, are trying to have their share from, if they cannot return, the genie of gambling in the bottle. This, for instance, has seen Henry Rotich, Kenya’s Finance Minister, seeking to impose a 50 percent tax on gaming and betting operators in 2017. President Uhuru Kenyatta, however, reduced the tax to 35 percent as he signed the bill into law in June 2017. Kenya Revenue Authority is grappling with how to impose and collect 20% tax on lottery, betting, gaming or gambling winnings.
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As your article is just about to be published another text message comes in. This time round from SureWinsKE: “CONFIRMED
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