I bet gambling is the shiny new crisis of innocence, ignorance

“What you don’t know won’t hurt you” gets thrown at people all the time. Biblical notion, that one, tied to the premise that innocence or purity will be preserved by not knowing.

This old-timey belief is all over the place like an infestation. When challenged, it is, protected by the argument that “this is how things are done. This is how things have always been done.”

Or, worse yet, by “it is better this way, you can’t handle the truth, this is good for you”.

Is it, though?

This miserly, censorship mindset is probably part of why so many people need therapy as adults, thank goodness more people are taking it up as humanity evolves to include mental and emotional in its definitions of health.

Case in point: Gambling addiction that has caught some of the media’s eye lately, and which has certainly caught my eyes and ears this year too.

I found myself musing the other day about the big betting companies in Tanzania. What if they were enabling gambling on the Women’s World Cup 2023, would that mean good things for women’s football? Would we like them to be sponsors? Like some of them are for sports clubs?

No, no, thank you. I like money to be useful to feminism, sure, but I prefer that money to have some moral standing if possible. No crumpled notes soaked in the tears of addicts and innocent folk, thank you.

When I was growing up, gambling was illegal in Tanzania and advertising gambling was illegal, too.

Same with alcohol and tobacco. In the event, alcohol is an old friend to Tanzanians, and we seem to manage the thirst well enough.
Tobacco never quite took off.

We generally view smoking cigarettes the way American evangelicals view cannabis: With a keen suspicion and a fear of its corrupting powers.

Gambling, though? I have no idea how this one got away from us, but I do have some thoughts.

First and foremost, nobody talks about gambling. The vocabulary itself is fairly new in use in Kiswahili, and it doesn’t carry the weight of familiarity that sex, alcohol, drugs and cigarettes do.

Honestly, those taboo subjects are already struggling to be spoken about fairly and lucidly for the sake of public health so you can imagine how poorly gambling is doing.

Worse yet is that gambling isn’t really understood by most of its target ‘customers,’ not really.

We don’t have the basic tools necessary to compute its benefits and its perils before we get into it.

I blame the government for creating the perfect conditions for people to succumb in droves to this shiny new area of personal and social crisis.

And next week I will tell you how it is all the government’s fault.

In the meantime, Go African Teams at the WWC2023! May you beat all the odds.

Elsie Eyakuze is an independent consultant and blogger for The Mikocheni Report; Email [email protected]