The Coalition of Lotto Operators, Agents and Writers Association (CLOAWA) has bemoaned the exclusion in the decision of the National Lottery Authority (NLA) to roll out multiple daily draws, seven days a week.

According to the group, even though the NLA has been engaging some stakeholders including the Ghana Lotto Operators Association (GLOA), and CLAAG to discuss many reforms in the past, which largely contributed to the relatively peaceful industrial harmony, consultation on this present issue, in their view, has not been exhaustively dealt with in order to merit a roll out.

CLOAWA in a statement signed by Richard Asiedu, the Secretary and copied to GhanaWeb said, the action by the NLA makes them feel “sidelined and devalued.”

The statement further added that “the NLA by taking this unilateral decision has therefore broken the trust and goodwill that exists between it and its important stakeholders.”

Read the full statement below:

The Coalition of Lotto Operators, Agents and Writers Association (CLOAWA) has been reliably informed that the National Lottery Authority (NLA) intends to roll out multiple daily draws, seven days a week very soon. As stakeholders, we feel sidelined and devalued.

Though the NLA has been engaging some stakeholders including the Ghana Lotto Operators Association (GLOA), and CLAAG to discuss many reforms in the past, which has largely contributed to the relatively peaceful industrial harmony, consultation on this present issue, in our view, has not been exhaustively dealt with in order to merit a roll out. We were looking forward to further discussions on the matter which would culminate into fashioning out a more lasting industrial practice which would be tailor-made to suit our peculiar situation as a nation.

The NLA by taking this unilateral decision has therefore broken the trust and goodwill that exists between it and its important stakeholders. This multiple daily draws the NLA intends to carry out will have very negative socio-economic repercussions for our dear nation. Already, some of the NLA’s games have not been market enough to excite the interest and participation of the staking public. Also, the sports betting companies are catching the attention of the youth and young adults from the NLA games and thereby stunting the growth of the NLA market. Taking the principle of inflation into account, we believe that flooding the NLA market with unnecessary proliferation of new games will further dilute the already fragile interest of the staking public, causing huge revenue and job losses.

Further, the multiple draws can potentially force a number of NLA Licensed Private Operators (LPOs) out of business since they may not have the capacity to pay wins many times in a day. This can lead to many Lotto Writers losing their jobs, jobs that enable them to make honest living. The unemployment situation in Ghana is already perilous and any action by Government Agencies especially to aggravate the situation is tantamount to gross insensitivity and abuse of power. It should also not be lost on the NLA that unemployment is gradually becoming one of the courses of insecurity in our country today hence every effort must be made to guard against it.

The NLA therefore needs to strike a careful balance between increasing its revenue and finding solutions to unemployment in a more sensitive manner. This may include devising strategies to market and promote the existing games, making it comparatively enticing and competitive to sport betting in order to increase it market share in the lottery space.

It is also the firm belief of CLOAWA that the NLA as a regulator is pushing too forcefully to introduce new reforms when it has not ensured that its existing regulations are strictly adhered to by all industry players. We therefore call on the NLA, in the spirit of industrial harmony, to work at enforcing existing regulations first before introducing new policies.
Finally, CLOAWA is sending out a strong message of its readiness to marshal its members and other industry players to work through every legitimate means available to it to ensure that this policy in its present form is not introduced to corrupt and devalue the NLA game, which will result in revenue and job losses.

For this reason, we urge NLA to suspend the introduction of the daily multiple draws to deepen further engagements with industry stakeholders with the hope of coming up with a homegrown product instead of the one-size-fit approach imported from elsewhere.

SIGNED: Richard Asiedu

Secretary of the Coalition of Lotto Operators, Agents and Writers Association (CLOAWA)