The New Patriotic Party (NPP) has indicated that it will consider the restoration of the 25 percent commission for lotto receivers if the party wins the general elections.
Acting National Chairman of NPP, Freddie Blay disclosed this when the leadership of the Concerned Lotto Agents Association of Ghana (CLAAG) paid a courtesy call on him at the party’s national headquarters at Asylum Down, Accra yesterday.
“We will seriously consider the 25 percent commission and bring you all under it, because if you are talking about 500,000 people in an industry, you can’t wish it away.”
The association is a non-governmental organization that consists of private lotto writers and agents who work with private lotto operators.
Several pleas by the Concerned Lotto Agents Association of Ghana (CLAAG) for government to review the existing law have so far been ignored.
Concerns
National Coordinator of the association, Kwaku Duah Tawiah, who led group, expressed concerns about the existing law that regulates the lotto industry, adding “we are concerned because from 2001 to 2002, the erstwhile Kufuor administration started a move to abolish private lottery in the country.”
According to him, they were not happy with the development and attempted to persuade government to rescind its decision.
He said “eventually, the law [Act 722] was enacted in the year 2006. By this law, our members, who were about 2 million Ghanaians, lost their jobs.”
Underground operations
As a result, Mr Duah revealed that most of these persons operate clandestinely which has often resulted in encounters with the police and other security agencies.
. “We are here to appeal to them that when they come to power, they should reconsider the law to enable us work and pay our taxes since we are also Ghanaians,” he added.
“When I was with a certain lotto company as director of operations, we had 1,700 lotto agents and each one of them had not less than 40 writers, and at that time we had 68,000 people working in that company, apart from an office staff of 348 people,” he revealed.
Unfortunately, due to the law, the company has now reduced its staff drastically, operating with a 28-man office staff while the whereabouts of the 68,000 workers remain unknown, he added.
Party would create jobs
Mr Blay said the NPP administration at the time found it necessary to bring lotto operators and the industry under one umbrella and that the law was not deliberately made to render agents and operators jobless but streamline the operations.
The NPP acting chairman added: “We can see operators, stakers and so forth have gone underground; although the NLA is still in charge, government is not having the full benefit of taxation from the industry.”
That notwithstanding, we’ve made it clear that we want to create jobs; it is a policy of the party to make sure that greater percentage of men and women in our country will be in the position to put food on their table to feed their families and take care of other expenses of their families, so we take that one very seriously.”
Vote wisely
He therefore charged lotto operators, agents and writers to vote wisely to get the desired change they seek after the November polls.
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