The National Lottery Authority’s long-running partnership with a private technology company, KGL Technology Limited, is facing its most searching questions yet, as new investigations, civil society activism and parliamentary scrutiny converge on a licensing arrangement critics say has handed a core state revenue stream to a private player on unusually generous terms.
At the center of the storm is an exclusive licence that allows KGL to run the NLA’s popular 5/90 lottery online via USSD and other digital channels. Investigations by The Fourth Estate, an accountability newsroom, have reported that KGL generated more than 3 billion cedis in revenue from the 5/90 online lottery in 2024, while the NLA was contractually due only about 157.6 million cedis that year in licence fees and contributions across Ghana, Nigeria and Côte d’Ivoire. That is roughly 5.2 percent of KGL’s reported revenue from the product, according to documents cited by the outlet.
The deal’s defenders say such comparisons ignore the financial and technological risks KGL assumed in moving Ghana’s lottery business online and helping the NLA clear old debts. But critics in Parliament, civil society and some segments of the media argue that the agreements not only undervalue the state’s flagship lottery game, but may also conflict with the law that established the Authority.
The current NLA director general, Mohammed Abdul-Salam, appeared to acknowledge unease over the terms when he told Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee in late October that, in his “candid” view, “the state can gain a lot more” from the KGL contract and that “there is every reason for it to be renegotiated.”
The partnership dates back to 2019, when then director general Kofi Osei-Ameyaw granted KGL what was described as a provisional three-year licence to sell the NLA’s 5/90 lottery online via USSD. In 2022, his successor, Samuel Awuku, and a new board extended the relationship into a 10-year licence. Then, before that licence ran its course, the NLA leadership in early 2024 replaced it with a 15-year agreement running from 2024 to 2039, with an option to renew for a further five years.
The 2024 arrangement, according to documents cited by The Fourth Estate, granted KGL exclusive rights to operate the 5/90 lottery online and by USSD, at a time when the authority’s own data suggested that roughly 80 to 90 percent of stakers had migrated to mobile platforms. In effect, critics say, the deal put almost all of the NLA’s core lottery business into the hands of one private company.
The same leadership also signed 10-year contracts with KGL for similar 5/90 online operations in Nigeria and Côte d’Ivoire, tying the Ghana-based company even more closely to the NLA’s regional ambitions.
One of the most pointed questions is where the money goes.
Under Ghana’s National Lotto Act, the NLA relies on Lotto Marketing Companies to sell its products, but the law requires that proceeds from lottery sales be paid into a Lotto Account managed by the Authority, from which commissions to agents and prize payments are made. Any surplus is to be transferred monthly into the national Consolidated Fund, while deficits can legally be charged back to that fund.
The Fourth Estate’s reporting alleges that the NLA’s arrangements with KGL depart sharply from that model. Rather than daily sales revenue flowing into the Lotto Account, KGL’s receipts from online 5/90 sales reportedly sit in the company’s own accounts. KGL pays winners directly and then remits an agreed “revenue share” and earmarked amounts for the NLA’s Good Causes Foundation and Lotto Stabilisation Fund, instead of receiving a commission on sales as traditional agents do.
The investigative series also highlights provisions in the 15-year exclusive licence requiring weekly reconciliation of sales, prizes and revenues between KGL and the NLA. According to letters referenced in the reports, such reconciliations had not taken place, leaving the Authority without full visibility over how much KGL was making from its platform. When the NLA pressed for data, KGL reportedly sought to push full reconciliation to 2026, before later asking for more time.
The matter escalated this month when The Fourth Estate reported that the National Communications Authority had instructed telecom companies to release detailed data on KGL transactions to the NLA, a move framed as an attempt to verify KGL’s sales figures independently.
Critics say that opacity around sales and revenues helped create a situation in which KGL has been profitable even as the NLA’s own contribution to the Consolidated Fund collapsed. Figures obtained by The Fourth Estate from the Finance Ministry show the Authority paid about 37.1 million cedis into the Consolidated Fund in 2018, the year before the first KGL licence. That dropped to 17.7 million cedis in 2019 and 16.4 million in 2020, then fell to 6 million in 2021 and zero in both 2022 and 2023. Meanwhile, KGL told the outlet it made about 70 million cedis profit on more than 3 billion cedis in 2024 revenue from NLA business.
For groups like the Good Governance Advocacy Group Ghana, the structure of the deal is not just bad policy; they argue it is unlawful.
In a statement in June, the group described the partnership as “one of the greatest state-capturing scandalous deals” in Ghana’s recent history and called for its immediate cancellation. It said KGL’s “takeover” of the 5/90 online lottery breached key provisions of Act 722, which reserves the conduct of lotteries to the NLA, and alleged that the deal effectively handed a vital public institution to private interests.
The group also traced the roots of the arrangement to what it called opaque leadership decisions at the NLA, including the marginalisation of existing Lotto Marketing Companies. It argued that allowing a private firm to control the digital channel for the Authority’s flagship product, and to keep and disburse revenues in its own accounts, cut against both the letter and the spirit of the law.
Supporters of the deal, however, insist the relationship is a licensing arrangement squarely grounded in the NLA’s enabling statute and regulations. The Chamber of Indigenous Business and Investors, in a detailed rejoinder to The Fourth Estate, argued that KGL “has no contract” with the NLA in the procurement sense, but rather holds a licence issued under sections 5 to 14 of Act 722 and relevant provisions of L.I. 1948. Licensing of Lotto Marketing Companies and collaborators, the Chamber said, has historically not gone through public procurement procedures, because such licences are not supply or works contracts.
The Chamber also disputed the claim that KGL’s arrangement amounted to an unfair monopoly, noting that USSD and online channels for various lottery products have long been exclusive to particular codes and operators. It said KGL’s *959# short code for 5/90 is one of several exclusive arrangements the NLA maintains for different games.
Beyond legality, both sides have waged a numbers war over whether KGL is shortchanging the state or rescuing the Authority.
The Fourth Estate’s investigation framed the licensing fee and related payments as “peanuts” compared with KGL’s estimated 3 billion-cedi annual revenue from the online 5/90 lottery, and linked the deal’s start in 2019 to a steep decline in the NLA’s profits for the state.
KGL’s allies counter that the comparison is misleading. Razak Kojo Opoku, a former NLA public affairs official who has emerged as one of the deal’s most vocal defenders, has said that KGL paid 157.6 million cedis to the NLA in 2024 and is expected to pay 170 million in 2025, for a total of about 327.6 million cedis over the two years. He argues that these payments exceed any single-year contribution the NLA itself made to the Consolidated Fund in the decade before KGL entered the picture.
The Chamber of Indigenous Business and Investors goes further, asserting that the amount KGL has paid to the NLA from 2019 to 2024 exceeds what the Authority remitted to the Consolidated Fund between 2013 and 2024. In its view, the NLA’s financial woes predated the KGL partnership and stem from structural issues like legacy debts, illegal lottery operators and outdated commission structures, not the licence itself.
Critics respond that such defenses sidestep the central question: whether, in a digital age where almost all staking has moved online, it is prudent for a public authority to give a private licensee exclusive control over its main revenue stream and allow the company to sit between state coffers and lottery players.
The contract dispute has spilled into a broader battle over media accountability and the treatment of indigenous businesses.
After The Fourth Estate published its series describing a “terrible” NLA-KGL deal that left “G Ghana bleeding,” KGL and its allies pushed back hard, accusing the newsroom and its parent organisation, the Media Foundation for West Africa, of sensationalism and factual errors. The Chamber of Indigenous Business and Investors accused the investigators of “gross ignorance” of lottery operations, while a pro-KGL commentary on News Ghana questioned whether the outlet had become a “bitter” antagonist of the company.
A former NLA board chairman has filed a 10 million-cedi defamation suit against the Media Foundation and four journalists, including those behind The Fourth Estate’s reporting, over their coverage of the KGL deal, according to court filings reported in local media.
The KGL Group’s executive chairman, Alex Apau Dadey, has publicly lamented what he describes as a hostile media environment for successful local businesses. In recent remarks, he urged journalists to apply the same level of scrutiny to foreign firms as they do to Ghanaian-owned companies, suggesting that indigenous investors often face “economic witch-hunting.”
At the same time, good-governance advocates have seized on the NLA-KGL saga as a test case for how state entities manage partnerships with politically connected private actors. The Good Governance Advocacy Group has framed the deal as a form of “state capture,” while some opposition politicians have questioned in Parliament how a private firm appears able to pay lottery winners on time while the state authority has struggled to meet its own obligations and remit funds to the Consolidated Fund.
For now, the KGL licences remain in force, and the 15-year exclusive deal signed in 2024 still runs on paper until 2039, with a potential renewal into the 2040s. But the NLA’s current leadership has signaled an openness to renegotiate, and the argument over whether the state is getting a fair deal has moved from newsroom investigations into hearing rooms at Parliament and onto the streets, where civil society groups have petitioned for cancellation of the arrangement altogether.
Any attempt to overhaul the partnership is likely to involve not just commercial wrangling, but also legal questions about the NLA’s powers, the scope of licensing under Act 722, and the obligations of the Authority to protect public revenue in an increasingly digital lottery market.
In the meantime, Ghanaians who dial a short code to stake the familiar 5/90 have little visibility into the complex financial and legal architecture behind each ticket. The debate over the KGL deal is, at its core, about whether that architecture serves the public interest, or whether the odds have quietly tilted in favor of a private player holding the keys to the country’s lottery cash machine.
