Addicted to betting

Before I expelled Facebook from my laptop, I used to have occasional exchanges with a teacher in Kenya who was very into our Premier Division football and betting on same. So the article in the MIT Technology Review at reference 1 caught my eye.

The story starts with a company called Safaricom who built a very successful mobile money app called M-pesa (M for 'mobile' plus the Swahili word for money). A good result of which is that a lot more Kenyans now have access to the sort of banking services which we take for granted. A bad result of which is that a lot more Kenyans have the necessary cash or credit to get into online betting. With another company called SportPesa being only to happy to take them on.

What with one thing and another, including the shortage of decent jobs for people with tertiary qualifications, there has been a regular epidemic of online, more or less addictive, gambling. Lots of people are getting themselves into a pickle. An epidemic which is spreading to other parts of the continent.

I have tended to be fairly permissive about these things: I might not care for the sort of people who pay themselves the hundreds of millions of pounds a year which they have sucked out of online gamblers, but nor did I see prohibition as the answer. Not a good plan to make illegal something that lots of more or less respectable people want to do.

A line complicated in the case of the Kenyan government by the revenue that online betting provides - a complication which we know all about here in the UK with our heavy taxes on tobacco and alcohol.

Nevertheless, I think that they are trying to push back, to get the volume of online betting down, while stopping short of banning it. Maybe for the moment this is the right thing to do. In time, when they have proper jobs, suburban gardens & barbecues to attend to, maybe Kenyans will lose their interest in betting.

PS 1: there were some heavy gamblers in TB in the olden days, including one or two problem gamblers who had managed to kick the habit. People who could not walk past an open betting shop without placing a bet. People who would rather bet than eat. Maybe even people who would steal to bet. But for the moment, problem gambling notwithstanding, I still favour the middle road; discouragement & support rather than prohibition.

PS 2: there was a second postscript which touched on this last at reference 5.

References

Reference 1: How mobile money supercharged Kenya’s sports betting addiction: In Kenya, and elsewhere in Africa, the rapid spread of smartphones and mobile money has come with a stubbornly persistent vice: online gambling - Jonathan W. Rosen - 2022.

Reference 2: https://www.ke.sportpesa.com/en/sports-betting/football-1/.

Reference 3: https://www.sportpesa.uk/.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SportPesa.

Reference 5: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/05/starbucks-reserve-roastery.html.