The Kenyan government is (finally) concerned at the rampant sports betting and online gambling that has now taken hold in the country and is ruining families and misleading minors. The body that oversees gambling, betting and lotteries, (BCBL) as a ‘warning’ has decided to suspend for 30 days all online advertisements involving betting, poker and gambling sites, pending further decisions.
The concern of the board chairperson, Jane Makau, mainly concerns minors and vulnerable people.
Advertisements, according to the BCBL, misrepresent the meaning of play and ‘increasingly propose gambling as a legitimate investment opportunity and a shortcut to getting rich’.
A business that borders on illegality and immorality because it deliberately involves minors and in some cases even poor children from the slums of Nairobi. 

‘Particularly worrying is the rampant dissemination of advertisements related to gambling during the evening, which exposes the most vulnerable members of the population, particularly minors, who are gradually drawn into gambling addiction,’ Makau said.
In fact, the same government agency had last week downplayed the alarm raised by an investigation that appeared in the national media, which among other things quantified the annual spending of Kenyans on gambling at more than EUR 6 billion.
For some time now, public opinion, many NGOs and some activist bloggers have been publicly denouncing the immoral business for a country grappling with so much misery and social inequalities like Kenya, and also the taxes that the State collects by allowing sports betting sites to spread.
Some time ago, another investigation, conducted by the British Sunday Times, found that European betting agencies, and also African ones, use market techniques that are banned in the UK, targeting in particular the very young, when they should be banned.  

They use cartoon characters and even give away football shirts and other sportswear to attract them. In the betting shops of a British company in the slums of Nairobi, the Sunday Times reported on 14-year-old boys playing freely, in violation of Kenyan law as well. Messages are circulating on the radios urging them to try, what other practice can win you a million shillings while risking only losing 100 shillings. The problem is that those one hundred shillings are the survival threshold of a resident of the slums of Nairobi, worth a plate of beans and vegetables a day, a slice of porridge, and must also have something left over day after day to pay the rent of a tin shack.
By cynically leveraging extreme poverty and the hope that a miracle will happen so that their social condition and thus their life can change, betting companies lead minors to get money any way they can to try their luck, sending a diseducational message in defiance of the rules. 

So now, during the government-mandated suspension period, gambling operators and promoters have been asked to submit all gambling-related advertisements to the Kenya Film Classification Board (KFCB) for examination, classification and issuance of a certificate of approval. Recently, Labour Minister Alfred Mutua had said that the betting sector should be protected because it employs over ten thousand Kenyans and contributes to community projects in the area of corporate social responsibility, as well as generating revenue for the state through excise, withholding and taxes. By 2025, the projection is around 20 billion shillings. Of course, net of a few winnings, one wonders into whose pockets the money of so many uneducated kids and fathers of families who sometimes end up on the breadline with even tragic consequences for them and others ends up. This suspension is welcome, but surely it is not enough, let us hope that it is only a starting point and not a sop to those who lead battles for a different morality appropriate to the everyday life of Kenya.