From as far back as the 1990s, the Ingraham administration had talks about the introduction of a national lottery, The Nassau Guardian understands. But it seems the powerful church lobby and the equally powerful numbers bosses made it impossible for the government to clear a path toward the introduction of a lottery. Kyle Keehan, a former director of the Jamaica Lottery Company, who is credited with helping to establish many modern lotteries in the Caribbean, said he and his team met with the government in the late 1990s about the possibility of setting up a national lottery.
"The Bahamas was the last of the islands that didn't have a lottery, and we know that the current numbers games there, the revenues are quite large, and the discussions we had with government there were to make that a government operation, where the government was benefitting from it," Keehan said in an interview with The Guardian. According to a 1999 article in The Jamaica Gleaner, Keehan was also a part of a high-ranking team from the Caribbean lottery industry that presented a proposal to create a Caribbean lottery similar to the U.S. Powerball game, where jackpots up to that point had reached $295 million.
The Gleaner noted that Keehan and his partners had been meeting with political and commercial leaders in the region to establish the parameters of the regional lotto game. These discussions focused mainly on which regional organizations will benefit from the funds. Keehan told The Guardian the idea failed because multiple interests failed to reach agreement. "We went to one of the CARICOM meetings and presented it to all the prime ministers and there was a lot of interest in it... What happened is we went country by country and everyone had different interests, but they never were able to agree on the fundamentals of how it was all going to work," he explained. While national lotteries have long been established in many major countries in the region -- like Jamaica and Barbados -- one has yet to get off the ground in The Bahamas.
The Barbados lottery, for example, has as its mandate to "support sports, youth and culture". Lotto tickets are purchased from any of the more than 200 authorized lottery retailers and any adult 18 years or older can play. Keehan said at the time he spoke to the Bahamas government, countries throughout the region all had some form of lottery, some more modern than others with better technology. "The Bahamas really was the holdup," he said.
"The only difference I could see with The Bahamas to the other islands is that none of the other islands had those illegal numbers houses that were operating there, and so there wasn't a special interest group like that, that was lobbying the government to block the lottery. "...The others were able to get their lotteries up and running." Referendum When Prime Minister Perry Christie revealed in an exclusive interview with The Nassau Guardian last week that the government has engaged UK consultants to advise on the establishment of a national lottery, it added another element to the already divisive and emotional gambling debate.
The idea of a national lottery in The Bahamas has been bandied about for many years, but it is taking on new steam these days as the Christie administration prepares to call a referendum on gambling. The government has said the referendum will ask voters if they agree to the establishment of a national lottery and/or the decriminalization of numbers houses. But voters do not yet know how a national lottery would be structured and how it would co-exist with legalized numbers houses -- should the referendum pass. Just how widespread illegal gambling operations are is unknown.
Back in 2006, Minister of Tourism Obie Wilchcombe reported that there were at least 45 illegal gambling houses in New Providence and 12 in Grand Bahama, and 60 percent of the population was spending anywhere from $1.8 million to $2 million locally and abroad on games of chance each week. Kenyatta Gibson, who at the time was chairman of the Gaming Board, reported that the Florida Lottery had conservatively estimated that Bahamians playing the Florida Lottery were spending US$100 million every year. Prime Minister Christie has said one of the concerns that has been expressed about a national lottery is that the country does not have the population base to support one.
But he suggested this might not be an issue with millions of tourists coming to the country every year. Keehan noted that a larger jackpot always draws more excitement, but he said lotteries in countries with smaller populations could also work. "We operated successful lotteries in countries like Grenada and Dominica where the populations are around 100,000, and so they were successful on their own, but when you're running a lottery and you want to grow the business for the government so there's more revenue, what happens in these smaller populations is the lotteries will have a tendency to join with other countries of similar size and to pool [everything] into one larger jackpot," he said.
"Also in small populations, if you offer a variety of different games, that works very well." Pros and cons The potential benefits of a national lottery have been aired many times -- funding for education, health and sports, etc. Many countries have boasted about the importance of this funding to the development of national programs. For example, following the recent London Olympics, former British Prime Minister John Major was praised for his vision in facilitating the establishment of a national lottery in 1994.
The lottery has given substantial sums of money to support British sports programs. A Reuters report recently noted that in Atlanta in 1996, Britain won one gold medal. In Beijing four years ago the country won 19. In London this summer, Britain won 29 gold medals -- its best performance since the first London Games in 1908. "You cannot unravel in terms of performance all the different elements that when brought together create a medal performance," said British Olympic Association Chairman and former Sports Minister Colin Moynihan in the Reuters story. "But what you can say about the funding that John Major and the lottery has delivered is that it has provided a platform for athletes with outstanding talent to deliver personal bests.
"It has enabled athletes to be surrounded by quality coaching and all the support staff that are necessary to assist that athlete, and in some sports the technology, to go through." Following the recent Olympic Games, many people who support the establishment of a national lottery have opined that Team Bahamas -- which brought home a gold medal in the men's 4x400m relay -- could have done even better if the national sports program was better funded. But while national lotteries certainly have their benefits, many people point to the downside of gambling, arguing that it fuels numerous social ills, including crime.
Keehan pointed to two models for national lotteries. One is where the government runs the lottery. The other model involves the government licensing the lottery to a private company. "When the government runs it, they have a tendency to run it too much like a government organization," Keehan explained. "So they don't have a really great approach to the marketing and management of an organization like that. "When it's privatized you get entrepreneurial types that go in there and there's a huge amount of investment that's involved, and what you find is that they tend to operate more efficiently and make lots of investments without all kinds of bidding processes and slowing it down.
"So it tends to be a lot more efficient." Challenges Keehan said he started his work with national lotteries back in the 1980s with the establishment of a lottery in St. Vincent. His work extended to Grenada, St. Lucia, Dominica, Barbados, Antigua, St. Kitts, Belize, Guyana and Jamaica. Keehan explained that one of the challenges faced in establishing these lotteries involved issues of trust with the general public. "So when we went in there we had to convince the public that the operations were secure and fair to everybody," he said.
The other challenge involved putting in place the right technology and infrastructure. "So we either worked with the infrastructure and came up with systems that would work with the existing infrastructure, or we built an entirely new infrastructure like we did in Jamaica," Keehan explained. "We put up all the radio towers and systems and didn't use the existing phone network at all. We put in our own." But today, the technology is a lot simpler. Keehan said it makes better sense to have one national lottery than multiple gambling operations.
"Any time in almost any country where there has been multiple lotteries run by different people, they tend to go bankrupt," he said. "I'm not a person who believes in monopolies, but when it comes to running national lotteries, I think that's about the only exception I'll make. There really should be one operator, one system and one group of games. "When you have them when they're competing like that, what they tend to do is spend a lot more on marketing, so it's always in your face. They raise the prize payouts. They become less profitable and sometimes things that aren't quite legitimate start to occur."
The assumption is that the UK consultants engaged by the current government will provide the necessary information for the government to make a determination on the structure of a national lottery. It would make good sense for the government to provide details ahead of the referendum on how a lottery would be set up, so that voters could have all the information in hand before they make their decision. It would also make good sense for people to know how and if this lottery would operate along with legalized numbers houses.
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