Amira El-Noshokaty plays the winning numbers "Nobody won the primo today," Adel El-Sohagi, an employee at a tobacco company told Al-Ahram Weekly as he pointed out that the winning numbers were listed as unsold. We stand outside the lottery room located at the Essaf branch of Cairo Bank. It is a modest room where little has changed since the 1960s, except that the blackboard used to mark the day's numbers has moved to the right-hand side of the window instead of the left. The centre of all action is the two cylindrical copper containers that hold within their bellies hundreds of small wooden numbered balls. One cylinder holds those marked with blue digits, the other those marked with red. Every morning, except Fridays, at 12.30pm, lottery vendors, attendants and players sit impatiently for the winning numbers to be written up on the board. Representatives of the Ministry of Social Affairs, the Lottery Vendors Coalition and Cairo Bank are present to turn the two cylinders, mix up the wooden balls and read out the selected numbers. One ball from each cylinder adds up to the winning number comprised of four digits. The lottery was founded in Egypt by members of the Greek community in the early 1940s. By the early 1960s three offices were supervising the issuing of tickets, namely the Solidarity Office, which was part of the Red Crescent NGO, Al-Orwa Al- Wothqa, an Islamic NGO, and the Egyptian Lottery Union owned by Keriako Mikalous. The three offices covered 7,000 distributors and 111 NGO beneficiaries nationwide. It was at this time that Keriako was accused of manipulating draws and claiming the prize money on unsold lottery tickets. The government made Cairo Bank the authority responsible for distributing and monitoring the lottery. Soon after that, the lottery coalition was formed in 1967. At the time it covered 2,000 lottery vendors and distributors nationwide. Today it covers around 200. While once a popular pastime, depicted by many a 1940s and 1950s movie as the answer to dire financial straits, this popularity changed in the 1970s when it was argued that the lottery was against Islamic teachings because it is a form of gambling. El-Sohagi has been a regular winner for the past 10 years. Despite his good luck, however, he thinks what he does is bad: gambling as opposed to charity. "I have been a lottery player for the past 25 years, I simply can't stop. I am addicted to it," he explains. El-Sohagi reminisces how he once won the top prize -- popularly known as the primo -- which came to LE2,500 and which he ended up spending on buying more lottery tickets. Yet the beneficiaries of the lottery are NGOs. According to Kamal Said, treasurer of the Lottery Coalition, "Some people are under the false assumption that the lottery is a form of gambling. This is not the case because all the money goes back to NGO funds and charity." Said sees a difference between this and "commercial" phone and TV lotteries. "If people think that the lottery is haram, then they should ban all kinds of lottery, including those advertised on television," he states. Said recalls that the ambulance centre on Ramses Street, the premises of the Mowasah social services NGO in Alexandria and the Umm Kalthoum Orphan House were all built through funds raised by the lottery. Today, however, sales are on the decline. "In the 1960s we used to sell almost all the 100,000 daily tickets but now we sell only 20,000 to 30,000 tickets. This is a burden on the Ministry of Social Affairs," he explained. Lottery ticket vendors are often judged by today's media as swindlers who trade in the dreams of the poor. Mohamed El- Sayed has been a lottery seller ever since he was 10. Now in his late 50s, he sits on a big slab of stone in a shady corner of Al- Galaa Street with piles of rectangular lottery papers in front of him -- 300 a day, most of which he sells to regulars. People like El-Sayed remain the only source of tickets. Due to the high taxes imposed on the tickets (60 per cent), many shops refuse to sell them. But El-Sayed complains that he suffers regular police harassment despite the fact that he has legal papers and is a member of the Lottery Coalition. "That's why all my children are educated employees and will never be yanasib [lottery] sellers," he appeals. Today, the hand full of vendors covering the Cairo area are provided 300 lottery tickets daily for the price of 25 piastres each (drawn daily), in addition to 50 more tickets for the price of 30 piastres (drawn weekly) and 50 piastres (drawn monthly). The vendor makes LE5 on every 100 lottery tickets sold -- all in all around LE20 a day. The first prize ranges between LE3,000 and LE6,000. "The Lottery Coalition gets one per cent of the income of the sold tickets while Cairo Bank takes 2.5 per cent and the rest goes to the Non-Governmental Organisations Support Fund. It's the Ministry of Social Affairs that loses a lot of money in the process because while 100,000 tickets are printed daily, only an average of 30,000 are distributed and the rest are wasted. Besides, the number of distributors is decreasing," added Said. "We need to address a larger sector of society. We need to explain that this is a form of charity, although it seems these days that only the poor are motivated to paying whatever money they have to service charity," he notes. Saad Abu Bakr, executive manager of the Lottery Coalition, explained that in an effort to address the decrease in popularity of the lottery and its attendants, the logo printed on the tickets was changed only a few months ago from "Yanaseeb" [lottery] to "Charity Tickets for the Benefit of the NGO Support Fund." "If the lottery is correctly and well publicised, through the aid of the Ministry of Social Affairs, it could increase the sale, grant more revenues and provide job opportunities to young people," noted Said. We look into the old room and he sighs, "It's a pity."
