Our marble game soon developed.
Instead of counting scores from how many times you knocked an opponent’s marble
and successfully entered the mother hole on the ground or having come from it,
one of us proposed a marble for a successful hit. He must have come from the
city or gotten the idea from the poisonous tree. It was a risk to engage in
such a game. How does a boy who begged hard to find a marble come to risk its
ownership simply for a hit?
The primary purpose of gaming I’d
say is to bond and have pleasure. It is not about winning and losing. It serves
as a way of passing time and a forum to bring about several topics of
engagement. Those who do not know how to play are easily taught and welcomed.
There is no joy in continuous wins when your game mate (not really an opponent)
is losing all the time. But when our marble game turned to a shilling a hit it
was no longer that pastime activity we had been introduced to. A mentality of
fraud, opportunism and spontaneous quarrels and fights was being developed.
Jakoyo Midiwo is our modern day
super legislature and the people of Gem Constituency should be thanked for
giving us a servant leader. I stick to the forums he is hosted in and I guess
he has tight schedules because everyone wants to host him. And yesterday on JKF Live I listened to him keenly as he
said how dangerous to the state the gaming is, proposing strict regulations,
quoting from an American research that only two point something percent jackpot
winners may be successful as the rest wallow in addiction, desperation and
related vices. Beside him sat the CEO to the current Kenya’s biggest mobile
sport betting – Sportpesa.
We are after money and the means
to it can be justified once we have it. It is a man’s world and he pulls
strings to his unsatiatable appetites. When betting companies are used to
sponsor sports, make people rich and influence social decisions we are likely
to say they have a good side. Even Satan got a good side if so he exists. The
timid man who won Ksh 23Million by only using hundred shillings in a jackpot is
a joke. Not even the gods of old did such miracles without lesson intent.
Here is the fallacy. You cannot
win more than what the betting companies have in account. You cannot make them
go broke. They will make sure that what you get from their kitty is manageable.
They are simply thieves. In your desire to get rich your monies could be
laundered in seconds from one part of the world to another making them grow
rich selfishly. So, when you hear about sending text messages to certain number
in a certain code, having it repeated throughout insulting some people’s
intelligence, and the sponsors are able to accumulate more than they will
dispense. Who knows how much was collected and who won without fraud?
Sometimes on issues like this I
get confused whether human understanding has been surpassed by human needs and
desire. We may be clinging to a human element that is not ‘modern’. We better
call it quits and wallow in trickery, treachery and debauchery. But what will
be the gain? Could we not walk to the pool and pay for the table because the
man pays rent and enjoy our game? Why bet?
Comments
Post a Comment