Gambling Life Away

It was the winter of 1991,during a short break while in medical school, I went to England on holidays but principally to earn some pounds working, all to try and keep up with the campus Joneses.
Unfortunately, UK was in a recession, there were no jobs and the winter was cold. With nothing else doing over the five weeks, I started playing all sorts of gambling games. Football polls, spot the ball, Littlewoods poll, lottery tickets-name them I played. Hoping to make the elusive “break” because some of them looked so so easy. I never once won anything. At the end of the holidays, I took the little money I had left and came back to Lagos and invested it in a friend’s business. I have never gambled again after that.

This personal experience encapsulates one hidden ill plaguing our youths today, a deadly time bomb-Gambling.
Lotteries, online casinos and the biggest variety in our environment- sports betting. Right there in our palms via our phones we can place bets on almost anything. The sports variety is the most common because it feeds off the legitimate passion for sports. It is estimated that the sports betting business runs into N 1.4 trillion annually .This is mostly fueled by passionate youths dropping averagely N1,000- N3,000 weekly and whose belief in their ability to forecast makes them willing partakers. Never stepping back to understand that the improbability of life guarantees that even if there will be winners for every bet, they are never the same people every time.