How the unfortunate attack on Bet9ja affects everybody even if you don’t bet

Popular betting platform Bet9ja has been down since Apr 6, 2022 and its website has been inaccessible after falling victim to a criminal cyber-attack.

The company has since put out a statement informing the general public of the said attack which has understandably generated a lot of reactions.

The main set of people directly affected by this are punters, people who use Bet9ja for its many betting-related purposes. But beyond the punters, Bet9ja’s unfortunate predicament could prove detrimental to a larger demographic, even those who do not bet.

For context, Bet9ja is not only the biggest betting platform in Nigeria, its site is the third most visited website in Nigeria behind only Google and YouTube, which is an indication of just how big this company really is.

For a country like Nigeria that has such a huge betting market, the biggest betting platform being down for four days is not a good thing. Of course, their competitors (and there are quite a lot) would not see it that way.

Bet9ja’s approach is more physical than online (even though they have a huge online market too), they have hundreds of thousands of shops around the country, which makes them massive employers of labour.

All of those shops have been made useless and the agents operating them redundant over the last four days which is the last thing anyone needed.

Beyond making money for Bet9ja, those shops served other purposes like free viewing centres where people could just walk in and watch football games or whatever else was on TV without paying a dime or having to bet first.

To some, Bet9ja shops offered free opportunities for electricity majorly to charge phones and other devices. As ridiculous as this may sound, it is the reality of many Nigerians who have relied on these shops for electricity, especially with the recent nationwide blackout.

Those shops that were created for betting have sort of morphed into ad-hoc rehabilitation centres as idle young people spend their time there not committing crimes.

As previously mentioned, there will be no shortage of competitors providing punters with alternatives to bet with over the last four days but none like Bet9ja.

It would take years for other betting companies to match Bet9ja’s reach and socio-cultural impact, the void their absence over the last four days has left is evident in our societies.

If we would just put our faux elitism to one side and look around us objectively, we would see it too.