For a lot of people who aren’t familiar with the world of betting, they visualize it as what Hollywood has shown us over the years. Lots of glitz and glam and the basic Las Vegas scene. You might also think that it’s for people who have lots of money that they can afford to lose…
Well, that is far from what the actual scene looks like. A closer look at Nairobi, at what has a lot of people glued to their phones, at the little shop between the other shops will show you just how deep and intricate this universe is.
The first person we talked to is Victor, a watchman in the Nairobi Central Business District. He’s 25 years old now and started betting at the age of 19. The watchman gig is his first job, and his colleagues are the ones who put him onto betting, starting with MultiBet and moving on up to Aviator in early 2024. He bets five days a week, once or twice a day, and says that it’s important to him to self-regulate because it’s easy to fall into addiction.
When we meet him, he’s just from placing a bet, and he told us how January has been such a bad month full of losses. The most he’s lost since he started betting is 1,500 Kenya Shillings, which may not seem like a lot of money, but when your monthly salary is 11,000 Kenya Shillings a month, it is. He has also taken a small loan of 200 Kenya Shillings to place a bet, which he ended up losing.
His wins- except the one time when a game called Aviator helped pay his rent- haven’t been as significant, which doesn’t seem to bother him as such. It seems that he bets just to bet, and he has tried to quit, but it’s hard when almost everywhere you go, there’s people betting or talking about betting. Ironically enough, people don’t talk about their losses as loudly, or at all.
Next, we go into a betting shop, one you wouldn’t ordinarily notice unless you have business that takes you there. It’s just a room, with a counter at the end, and the walls have small TV screens lined up near the ceiling, and sheets with team names, odds, and whatnot taped to the wall. In the middle of the room are benches, and when you walk in, there’s men seated on them staring up at the screens. Some are standing, and on the floor all around there’s torn-up strips of paper. One man is ripping aslip slowly, not even looking at it, his eyes still on the screens, and in them you can see a mixture of disappointment and bland hope for the next one.
Vincent is a regular there, and he quit his job when he started betting because he was winning in two days what he’d make in a month at his job. After some time, of course, his lucky streak ended, and his loved ones had to talk him into getting any other job he could find. He works in Marikiti Market now, and by ten am he’s done with work and in the betting shop already.
He can easily bet on his phone, but he has a system where he places bets at the shop and then on his phone later on. We could say he comes for the sense of community, where everyone is doing the same thing as you are.
Our next stop is somewhere deep in the CBD. We go up to the second floor of a building where there are vibandas on each floor and a lot of casual workers and freelancers eating there. We talk to Calvin, who’s a cook in one of the hotels. He’s 23 years old and got into betting when he was 15 years old after he was taught by a friend, and he started using his older brother’s phone to bet on the Premier League.
He never bets more than 200 shillings, and he bets twice or thrice a day every day. He earns 700 shillings a day as a cook, and the most he’s ever won is 1,500 shillings in 2021. Just like Victor, he’s tried to reduce the frequency at which he bets to maybe just a few days a week instead of daily, but he ends up going back to his old ways. He hasn’t ever tried to quit gambling completely, and hasn’t considered what his life would look like without betting.
The underbelly of Nairobi is full of everyday people going about seemingly ordinary lives, but what strings them together is the multiple betting sites that keep cropping up with very little regulation. People who are quitting their jobs for this and bottling up their feelings when they incur huge losses over it. People who have insane stories about what betting has done to them or what they have done because of it. People who think they are just in it for the big payday they think they’ll get, and even when they do, they put it all back into betting or lose it all to betting.
So how much of a gamble is this, really?
Written by: Makena Ngito
Photos by: Edwin Ndeke