FOUR days after he ordered the stopping of all gaming operations of the Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office (PCSO) with private groups granted franchises, licenses, or permits – Lotto, Small-Town Lottery (STL), Peryahang Bayan, and Keno – President Duterte revised his order so as to cover only STL. It appears the irregularities that prompted the closure order were largely limited to STL operations. So the very popular Lotto and the other games are back.
STL was a government project to end the old illegal numbers game of jueteng which was originally introduced by the Spanish colonizers in the 1800s. In towns all over the country from Luzon to Visayas to Mindanao, tickets were sold to ordinary folk betting on two digits from 1 to 37. In the early days, most bets were small amounts – as low as 25 centavos to one peso, which could win anywhere from P400 to P1,000.
Betting was easy. “Cobradors” made their daily rounds of houses in the smallest communities. People bet only small amounts they did not need for their daily needs and winnings sometimes went to food and drinks shared with neighbors. It was a poor man’s game and it persisted even when casinos were introduced where the rich could bet thousands of pesos on one throw of the dice.
Jueteng was a community affair, but illegal, and operators came to giving payoffs to local officials and police. In some parts of the country, it was so widespread that it earned big money for the provincial operators. The government in the 1980s decided to control it and thus take over the profits which could be used for its own charitable and other operations.
Thus was born the Small-Town Lottery. It was the same system as jueteng, the same small amounts collected by cobradors and in small ticket outlets. The old jueteng operators joined the government project in the new STL. Franchised STL operators were given minimum sales figures to meet, called “presumptive monthly retail receipts” (PMRR), based on the figures collected in the old illegal jueteng operations.
From the beginning, there was suspicion that the old jueteng operators did not completely close down. Their cobradors continued their community rounds, but now holding government STL cards. The winners continued to be announced. But the expected government share of the income was way below projections and expectations.
The Commission on Audit estimated that P7.6 billion was lost in unreported receipts in 2017, and another P7.3 billion in 2018. PCSO officials said the private operators were notified of the discrepancies but they came up with only P164 million of the missing P14.9 billion for 2017 and 2018.
This, in concrete figures, is what moved President Duterte to initially close down all PCSO gaming operations and then, last Tuesday, decided to limit the action to STL.
The other gaming operations – particularly the very popular Lotto – are back. We hope the STL problem can soon be sufficiently solved so this ancient gaming activity of so many poor Filipinos who still recognize it as jueteng can soon be restored.
