Howard Hamilton - HORSE SENSELAST WEEK, we examined the coming to life of a dream to provide an independent, permanent funding programme for the development of our youth through sports, through the setting up of a lottery, as many other countries had done, with considerable success.
This week we look at the trials and triumphs of the Sports Development Agency and later the Jamaica Lottery and their contribution to the realisation of a dream.
In 1991, we established the Sports Development Agency, which began with a "scratch and win" game, proceeds from which would be used to establish a fund for supporting various sports
programmes.
We modelled the special fund on the environmental trust fund which had recently been established, and asked a number of influential sports people to sit on the board to ensure transparency in the allocation of funds to the various sporting associations.
Things went well for about two years until the betting and gaming commissions were split into two, with a separate Betting Gaming and Lotteries Commission and the Jamaica Racing Commission. Ren Gonsalves had taken over as the unified chairman of both bodies. With the separation of the two commissions, the new chairman of the Betting Gaming and Lotteries Commission did not share the enthusiasm for a private-sector run and funded Sports Development Agency.
By this time, Michael Manley had retired and I did not feel the same level of excitement about the possibilities of this programme coming from official quarters. The company also found itself with an increasing debt burden, brought on by the massive devaluations of the Jamaican dollar against the US dollar and we ended up with debts in excess of J$114 million.
The banks tried to help, but with interest rates at 50 and 60 per cent, there was no way the programme could survive. It was at this time that we restructured the company and received approval to add a numbers game to our portfolio. The name of the company was then changed from Sports Development Agency to Jamaica Lottery Company. Only two of the original 21 shareholders were willing to put up any more money and my refusal to declare SDA Limited bankrupt and start a new company with those shareholders who were willing to take the risk would come to haunt me in later years.
OUT OF DEBT
We managed somehow to pull ourselves out of debt and the Jamaica Lottery Company became a success story, following the introduction of a number of different games. Sales reached in excess of $2 billion a year and we were contributing to the Sports Development Agency some $250 million a year.
The birth of the Reggae Boys and Jamaica's unprecedented qualification for and participation in the World Cup was testament to the vision of what could be done for our youth, with adequate funding. Today I have lost count of the number of underprivileged youth who were nurtured through the programme and who are now able to get substantial payment for their talent.
But success is not something that is always appreciated. Nor is it always understood. New levels of taxation reduced those sales to less than a billion dollars a year with the subsequent reduction in contribution to the Sports Fund. Somehow I saw my dream being shattered and I was helpless to try to restore it.
Several attempts were made by a number of different agencies to try and get the Government to understand that this taxation yielded less income to all players in the industry, the Government themselves and the Sports Development Fund. We spent countless hours lobbying to convince the Government that excessive taxation on the lottery was simply a way of killing the goose and pointing out that in other countries far more experienced with the kinds of gaming we introduced, lotteries have been initiated as an alternative to taxation, and a means of raising revenue for specific projects that governments would otherwise be hard-pressed to finance. But as we are wont to do in this country, we took a perfectly good idea and turned it into a totally unrecognisable hybrid, something that could simply not achieve the goals for which it was originally conceived.
Our frustration eventually led the shareholders to negotiate the sale of the company. I can now only look back and dream of what could have been and find some comfort in the few fleeting moments of the realisation of that dream in the football arena. I see basketball courts scattered across the island, with basketball now a major sport. I see playing fields, once barren, now flourishing with green grass and proper fencing. I see a number of areas that still give me pleasure, but every day I awake to the reality that there is more, so much more that could have been achieved.
Howard L. Hamilton is a former chairman of Caymanas Track Limited and is the current president of the Thoroughbred Owners & Breeders Association. He can be contacted at howham@cwjamaica.com.
