By JENERALI ULIMWENGU

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The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (Robert Tressel, 1914) could have been written with us in mind. Tressel wrote only one known book, but it has remained a classic in its genre (George Orwell called it a “social history”).

It simply takes a long and hard look at a group of proletarians in a small English town, clearly unable to feed themselves properly, but engaged in the business of enriching their exploiters, and unwilling (or unable) to contemplate a situation much different from what they have been socialised into.

Generally, that is the condition we suffer in many of our situations that we would have been capable of overthrowing if only we allowed ourselves space and time to think about what ails us.

In this instalment I want to talk about the phenomenal — and aggressive —upsurge in betting activities in Tanzania, although I know the situation is not very different in other countries in Africa.

Our young men and women are being turned into inveterate betters, as betting shops have sprung up all over the country — from our cities, towns, townships, minor settlements, hamlets and villages.

All our radio stations have taken up strident advertising promising the creation of millionaires twenty-four-seven and getting the young people to surrender what little money they have earned since morning to the glittering machines beckoning to them in their ramshackle huts .

Scrawny urchins

I have often stopped in a dirt-poor back alley where I went to get some service on my way to the outlying areas of our towns and observed a really frightening scene. Bare-bummed, scrawny urchins, who look like they have not had a breakfast, queueing up before some clinking machine, ready to feed it like some hungry and insatiable little neon monster.

You and I should know that they have been caught up in the web of a monstrous moneymaking scheme looking for these kids’ little money, and that they shall likely never escape: the bug has been planted in their minds, and they have no way of getting rid of it.

Though we should all know that betting has never made anyone rich, we let this situation be.

Billions of shillings are made hourly. If, say, there are a million betters parting with half a US dollar every time they play, that translates into half a million dollars every time they play, once.

If they play ten times in a day — and that happens very often — that comes to $5 million. That is in a day, which comes to $150 million in a month and in a year, we are talking of $1. 5 trillion (help me count the correct zero, you maths geniuses!

For all that, the scrawny, eager-faced ragamuffin placing all his earthly wealth into the blinking machine has been told that he will be a millionaire and he has heard someone being interviewed after he “became a millionaire” at every stroke of the hour.

But the half-naked kid does not have the gumption to understand that he will never get that lucky, and that the numbers are rigged against him in a contest in which there is only one winner.

I have tried to understand this phenomenon, and failed. In the mid-1990s, for instance, when Benjamin Mkapa was president, I was appalled by the granting of a tax holidays to casinos, as though they too were “investors”whose activities were going to open up economic opportunities for our people. Well, the government removed those tax holidays after some 10 years, but soon enough we got to learn of the reduction of the rate of taxation on these “investments” from 20 percent to 15 percent!

Sans-culottes

Right now, the betting world is in ecstasy over Tanzania’s stance of embracing betting as an economic activity, though for sure we are mobilising our most vulnerable members of society into a generous class of the sans-culottes to finance the super-rich betting conglomerates, whose only contribution to our economy is selling us unrealisable dreams of becoming millionaires on Never-come-day.

One of the most outrageous inanities I heard on some FM radio the other day is: Even when you lose, you win, and when you win you really win! How do you sell that idea except to the mentally diseased?

You wish our decision makers would pluck the courage to read just one book, and I would direct them to The Richest Man in Babylon (George Clason, 1926), where a few rules on how to get rich are laid out clearly, even for an economic dunce like me.

Then one might hope against hope that the authorities would take the requisite measures to save our youth from this debilitating affliction which has been recognised by experts as some sort of SUD (substance use disorder).

I’ve just said it, hoping against hope, because I do not believe that will exists, and if it does exist anywhere along the corridors of power, one is likely to come up against arguments like, the dirty money thus taxed helps finance “sporting activities”, which is pure balderdash, if you ask me.

Ulimwengu is now on YouTube via jeneralionline tv. E-mail: [email protected]