Gambling on a better future in the illegal Lottery

By Andrew Robb

It has been described as a “culture” of its own, and some estimate that over 80% of the Burmese population is involved. School classes may be cancelled because of it, some people may not show up to work, and even family relations are ignored and suffer. It is the illegal lottery, and for several years now, it has all but consumed the lives of millions of Burmese for several days each month—just about everyone seems to play the lottery.

Of course, they could choose to play the legal state lottery, which is just as frequent, and brings a chance at a much larger payoff. But the odds of winning that are tiny, the tickets more costly, and it probably doesn’t help that the proceeds to go the governing SPDC junta—which officially claims to distribute them to charities throughout the country. People clearly prefer the illegal lottery, and this is becoming a more and more significant component of Burma’s growing underground economy.

The concept of the illegal lottery is simple. For seven consecutive days every month, the Burmese government holds the Aung Bar Lay, the official state lottery. The grand prize draw is composed of a string of two letters and six numbers. The illegal lottery is based on the final two numbers in that string. You simply visit a ticket-seller, put down your money, pick your two numbers, and hope for the best. Although most people buy the cheap, five-kyat tickets, it is possible to bet almost any amount—300,000-kyat tickets have been sold—and odds of winning are about 80:1—not too bad for a small investment, as any gambler could tell you. The ticket-sellers are networked together in large groups, and most sellers have bosses, who themselves have bosses, all leading up to a chief who controls the lottery for a given area of Burma. On the day of the lottery, tickets are sold until half an hour before the numbers are announced, and winners can collect immediately after winning numbers are released.

Like many activities in Burma, the illegal lottery is largely based on corruption. Its smooth running requires lots of greased palms: police and government forces are paid very well to overlook the illegal lottery. It is impossible that they really are not aware of it: it is all pervasive, with ticket-sellers operating openly, and parties and carousing on nights of the draw. However, the underpaid police forces of Burma are just as likely as anyone else to want to profit from the lottery. They even buy tickets themselves sometimes.

The illegal lottery has operated in Burma for at least the past twenty years, but has steadily been growing so popular recently. Until a few years ago, a similar version of the lottery was common, based on the three last numbers of the Thai state lottery, but this has now been eclipsed, in popularity, by the simpler, easier-to-access Burmese two-number version.

I worked selling illegal lottery tickets. I would give the numbers and the money from the sale of the tickets to my employer ... She had to give thismoney to the township leaders an dpolice chiegs - around 500,000 kyat a year.

Of course, the popularity of the lottery in Burma is hardly an aberration. There are lotteries all over the world, and it is rare to find one that is not popular. Reasons for playing the lottery are pretty evident: it’s more fun to win money than to earn it, and it’s always nice to be able to dream of getting rich overnight. In Burma, however, these causes run deeper. For one thing, it isn’t always a matter of winning versus earning money in Burma: many people cannot earn money because there are no jobs or opportunities available, or else much of their harvest is taken by the government as soon as they can grow it. For people in this situation, an unfortunately familiar one in Burma, winning 5000 kyat in the lottery may be not so much a daydream as a best chance to survive. Since most people earn barely enough to live, it should come as no surprise that they attempt to supplement their incomes by way of the lottery. In many cases, since they play such small sums, players are not searching for a better life so much as a way to earn just a little extra on the side; perhaps just enough for some extra food for their families. However, for people anywhere, it is easy to become addicted to such gambling, and the lottery can ruin individuals and families even more quickly than elsewhere, since people in Burma have so little to lose.

In addition to the poverty it can bring to players, the illegal, underground nature of the lottery causes other problems. For one thing, since the illegal lottery is not guaranteed or underwritten by any institutional or state authority, there is always the possibility of failure to pay. There are stories about people who were overjoyed to win some money, only to find that the people selling the tickets could or would not pay out, nor could their bosses, or even their bosses’ bosses. This can endanger low-level ticket-sellers, who are dependent on operators high up the chain for the payout money; if these operators fail to come through, it is the bottom-level ticket-sellers who are usually held responsible. Imprisonment can result, or the illegal seizure of the ticket-seller’s possessions by players. In some cases, the ticket-seller may have all his possessions taken, and still wind up in jail. Evidently, not everyone involved in operating the illegal lottery stands to make great gains from it.

Perhaps most worrying are Burmese prisons that appear to be nearly overflowing with players and low-level operators of the illegal lottery. Last year, Burma Issues conducted a survey of recently freed Burmese prisoners, with the intent of gathering information regarding human rights abuses, treatment in prison, and other matters. However, in doing the survey, we found that seven of the twenty-two freed prisoners interviewed—nearly a third—had been sentenced for crimes related to the illegal lottery. The findings are not conclusive, since the survey was not representative and was aimed at gathering other information, but this proportion is shocking.

I gave 12,000 Kyat to the police one time. One month I should have paid 12,000 Kyat but I could only pay 10,000 Kyat which left me 2,000 Kyat short. When the police found out they arrested me and put me in jail.

However, the popularity of the illegal lottery shows no sign of fading in the near future; quite the opposite in fact. The growing importance of the underground economy to Burma means that it will necessarily be relevant to all the people at the grassroots level. Whether they are working in drug cultivation, in illegal mining or logging, or in the multiplying casinos that are spurring a huge tourist boom along the Chinese and Thai borders—and whether or not they are paid for their efforts, or forced into the labour—many grassroots people cannot help but become wrapped up in the unofficial, quasi-legal economy that is currently carrying Burma. Official per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP)—an imperfect but common measure of national welfare—is a very low US$104, much lower than US$2043 for neighbouring Thailand, and significantly less even than US$299 for struggling Cambodia (figures from 2002), showing that the official Burmese economy is on the verge of collapse. However, some international analysts estimate that the underground economy of Burma rivals the official one in size*. If this is true, or even close to the truth, it would make Burma quite unique in the world—few countries have underground economies even close to the size of their official GDP.

In a country so dominated by shady business and black-market finances, is it any wonder that the people of Burma have become consumed by one aspect of the underground economy? The illegal lottery is just as much a part of unofficial Burmese life as unauthorised logging, opium-cultivation, or the sex trade, for example. All of these enterprises, despite being illegal in Burma, are all-too-common activities. The lottery falls into the same category, only instead of being imposed on the Burmese people from the top-down, like illegal industry or state-condoned sex and gambling tourism, it seems to grow from the bottom-up. It carries risks, from financial loss to failure to pay out to incarceration in some cases, but the people of Burma choose to play it, and it seems like nothing will stop them anytime soon.

For more information, see Interview with Zaw Oo, The Irrawaddy, November, 2003.