Former Director-General of the National Lottery Authority (NLA), Sammi Awuku
Former Director-General of the National Lottery Authority (NLA), Sammi Awuku, has dismissed the government’s claim of abolishing the 10% tax on lottery winnings, calling it a misleading attempt to score political points.
Reacting to the 2025 Budget Statement presented by Finance Minister Dr. Cassiel Ato Forson, Awuku insisted that the so-called abolition was meaningless since the tax was never enforced under the previous administration.
“After listening to today’s budget presentation, I couldn’t help but notice a rather misleading claim that the government has abolished the 10% lottery tax on winnings,” Awuku stated.
“But let’s be honest: how do you abolish a tax that was never implemented?”
He explained that while the tax was initially proposed, extensive consultations with stakeholders—including the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA) and then-Finance Minister Amin Adam—revealed that enforcing it would cripple the lottery sector and be unfair to players. As a result, it was never applied.
“The truth is, the NPP government had already made the decision not to burden Ghanaians with this lottery tax because we understood its impact,” he argued.
Awuku also clarified the distinction between lottery and betting, stressing that the National Lottery Authority operates under the Ministry of Finance, while betting is regulated by the Gaming Commission under the Ministry of the Interior. He suggested that conflating the two was a deliberate political maneuver.
“Hon. Amin Adam won’t be wrong to say the betting tax was never collected anyway since the Finance Minister also referred to the 10% on lottery wins as ‘betting tax.’ If that’s what the Finance Minister calls betting tax, then it was never implemented even though it was passed in 2023,” he added.
He concluded by urging for transparency in policymaking, stating, “Ghanaians deserve honesty, not spin. Policies should be about real impact, not just headlines.”
Meanwhile, watch this Ghana Month special edition of People and Places as we hear the story of how the head of Kwame Nkrumah’s bronze statue was returned after 43 years, below: