A football fan bets on a game using SportPesa. PHOTO | FILE | NATION MEDIA GROUP The Kenyan gambling market is heavily dominated by online betting, which industry experts say typically returns 90 per cent of bets to punters as winnings.
The sheer number of bets and the regulator’s inability to access the data in real-time mean that "significant" under-declaring is also possible for digital firms.
The enormous scale of Kenya’s betting addiction can now be revealed.
Leaked figures from the betting regulator show that punters wagered more than Sh30 billion (US$300 million) in a single month last year.
The staggering size of the local betting industry has emerged from a leaked spreadsheet of revenue declarations made by gambling firms to the Betting Control and Licensing Board (BCLB) for May 2019, shortly before the government introduced tougher regulations and higher taxes.
Extrapolating from this monthly figure, punters were on track to spend more than Sh360 billion on betting annually had the government not stopped the party.
This amount is Sh257 billion more than what the national government allocated to health in 2019/20.
It is also more than the Sh327 billion used to build the Standard Gauge Railway from Mombasa to Nairobi and buy locomotives and coaches. It is also more than the Sh310 billion allocated to counties as shareable revenue last year.
The leaked data reveals that Kenyan punters staked nearly 180 million individual bets in a single month.
Kenya has an adult population of around 35 million, according to 2019 population census figures released by the Kenya National Bureau of Statics (KNBS). The average amount bet per stake was Sh170.
MENTAL HEALTH Gaming Awareness Society of Kenya co-founder Nelson Bwire reacted with shock at the figures: "Data we have submitted to the presidential task force on mental health indicates that gambling is a major contributor to mental health-related problems.The effects are devastating — family breakups, addiction, depression, unmanageable debt, increased crime and suicides. But to learn that people are spending such huge amounts on betting in such a short time? It’s absurd!"The revenue declaration snapshot was obtained by Finance Uncovered, a UK-based investigative journalism and training project, and shared with the Nation . It originated from an insider at the BCLB, which receives and compiles monthly revenue declarations from the industry.This is thought to be the first time that betting figures for the entire industry, albeit a one-month snapshot, have been made public.An industry source […]