National Lottery Authority says sale of manual coupon/tickets to end December 15

The National Lottery Authority (NLA) on Friday announced the end of sales of all manual lottery coupons or tickets with effect from December 15.

The authority has therefore urged its receivers and retailers to run down their stock levels to ensure that all such coupons and tickets were sold by December 15.

Addressing a press conference in Accra, Mr Kojo Andah, the Director General, NLA said all the remaining Lotto Marketing Companies who sold coupons would be migrated under the authority’s automation platform.

The press conference was aimed at announcing the revitalization of NLA’s Portfolios and platforms created for SMS and other electronic lottery.

It was to announce a new platform that would jointly run lottery games to provide direct support for the less privileged in society and the introduction of a scratch lottery brand for scratch games. Value added services such as airtime sales would also be included in the NLA operations.

Mr Andah noted that the NLA would not accept tickets or coupons after the deadline stated by authority.

He said internal arrangements were being made by the NLA to ensure that no jobs were lost.

“Internal arrangements are ongoing and staff members have been given the assurance that there would be no jobs losses,” he added.

Mr Andah said with technological advancement, most member countries of the World Lottery Association (WLA) had decided to eliminate the manual system of operation by mechanizing their lottery systems.

“Apart from menchanization to allow them to follow modern trends it also brought the advantages of lowering cost of operations and elimination of associated fraud.”

He said Ghana being a member of the WLA also needed to follow the trend in order to meet international standards for accreditation and certifications.

This, he said, had been the reason why from 2006 to date, the NLA had been implementing actions to automate its sales and distribution network in phases.

Mr Andah noted that the introduction of the point of sale terminals had not brought about reliability and efficiency but rather value for money and time saving benefits on the authority’s operations.

NLA has products including “Monday Special”, “Lucky Tuesday,” “Midweek”, “Fortune Thursday”, Friday Bonanza, “National Weekly”  “Scratch Lotto”  “Airtime Sales” and “SMS Lottery”

Caritas Lottery one of the NLA’s products has been specially designed to support the less privileged in society.

Lottery operations began in Ghana by Mr F.W. Breman, a Maltese who became the first Director of the Department of Lotteries now NLA in the late 1950’s.

He introduced the first fixed lottery game where five numbers are drawn randomly from one to 90.

Source: GNA