Abiodun doesn’t look like your typical Nigerian social media influencer. He’s not dressed head to toe in garish designer clothing. There isn’t a hard-to-pronounce Swiss brand watch adorning his wrist. He wears a Curren, an affordable Chinese watch brand popular in Nigeria. He doesn’t even arrive for our meeting in an expensive imported Mercedes GLC 300 or Range Rover, the calling card for any self-respecting member of the country’s Instagram elite. Abiodun drives a humble Toyota Camry.
Rather than spending all day posting online about a jet-setting lifestyle, Abiodun, 39, tells me he holds down a job as a facilities manager for a real estate company. And yet the unassuming, shaven-headed man I meet by the swimming pool of a downmarket hotel on the outskirts of Lagos, Nigeria’s biggest city, is a bona fide internet influencer, with thousands who hang on his words.
According to the national statistics agency, Nigeria has nearly 165 million internet users. New celebrities are minted with astonishing frequency on the Nigerian internet, a cultural mishmash that draws on home-brewed and foreign — mostly American — influences. Big Brother Naija, a reality television show modelled on the global Big Brother franchise, has become an annual influencer factory, producing a seemingly endless stream of extravagantly coiffured people famous for being famous.
Downstream from the made-for-TV influencers with their movie-star good looks and endorsements, are those who serve a more targeted audience. Sports betting influencers are among this group. Each week, millions of people in this football-mad country watch games on their phones, in beer parlours or in tin shacks that double as “viewing centres”. Many place wagers on the outcomes of these matches, giving them a financial and emotional stake in the results.
A large number of those seeking advice on where to place their bets turn to influencers like Abiodun. Known to his nearly 50,000 followers as BoomBetNG, his skill lies in analysing the form of teams and in using that information to share betting predictions with his followers. “May the odds be in our favour this weekend,” he posted ahead of a recent match day. “Amen!” fired back one user. Prayers are commonplace among the #BoomFamily. Fire emojis are sprinkled liberally in tribute when predictions come to pass. Followers routinely refer to him as “Baba”, the Yoruba word for father, a sign of respect.
The rise of betting influencers has been in tandem with Nigeria’s booming gambling industry. Once seen as the sort of thing your degenerate uncle got up to on the weekends, the numbers gambling on sport are, says BoomBetNG, “crazy, it’s staggering”. Having started out sharing tips for fun on his personal X account, he now makes more money than in his day job. The story of how he became an influencer is also the tale of how millions are trying to find hope in a country where opportunities are scarce and the desire for alternative streams of income insatiable.
Since television coverage of Europe’s top football leagues exploded in the 1990s, Nigerians have been among its biggest fans. Most support at least one European team, in Abiodun’s case Chelsea from the English Premier League. He was just a young boy in south-western Nigeria when the country’s national team shone at the 1994 World Cup then, two years later, became the first African team to win football gold at the Olympics. When his favourite player from that team, Celestine Babayaro, joined Chelsea shortly afterwards, Abiodun started to root for his hero’s new English club. He’s been supporting them ever since.
Until a few years ago, Abiodun had never gambled on football. Things changed in December 2018. Despite working two jobs at the time, money was tight for his young family. His first child’s school fees were due and he was struggling to afford them. Having grown up an orphan, Abiodun felt acutely that it was his duty to provide for his family. He was already moonlighting as a sports presenter on local radio, and it was there that a colleague who was making money from gambling encouraged him to turn his knowledge of sport into extra cash.
Abiodun took his friend’s advice, setting up an account with an online bookmaker. On his second bet, a N2,000 stake on tennis matches earned him N77,000 (at that time equivalent to about $200). That was enough to pay the school fees. Then a few months later, he scored more than N400,000 (more than $1,000) betting on football, which was more than his monthly income. Weighing up his bets, Abiodun found a niche in predicting “straight wins”, a relatively rare approach that involves forecasting the winner of a football match. Straight wins are not as lucrative as spot bets, which allow punters to wager on particular things happening during a game, such as predicting the number of corner kicks awarded. Bookmakers offer them with lower odds as, in most cases, the better team wins. But, over time, Abiodun’s accumulators stacked multiple straight wins to increase the total earnings on offer.
It was during the pandemic that a marketer from BetKing, one of Africa’s largest bookmakers, noticed Abiodun. He had been writing a blog about his favourite sports — football, tennis and F1 — before pivoting to providing betting tips when he realised that got more traffic. The betting company invited him to post his tips with links and bonus codes that would funnel users to their betting platforms. In return he’d receive a monthly fee from the bookmakers he promoted. Even in Nigeria’s high-inflation economy, the extra money has made a significant impact, providing a “cushion” at a time when many families are skipping meals and generally struggling to make ends meet. In a good month, he makes as much as N1mn (currently equivalent to $650).
There’s one slight hitch. Abiodun is a practising and devout Muslim, and betting is haram, a sin according to Islam. When he first contemplated staking money on football matches, this presented him with a dilemma, which continues to this day. It’s why he didn’t want me to use his real name (Abiodun is his middle name) and why his wife has no knowledge of the social media influencer known as BoomBetNG or the source of the family’s extra cash.
BoomBetNG explained he had found a workaround to his problem: according to his nifty interpretation of Islamic text, the impact of a sin is lessened if you don’t broadcast it. Allah, all-knowing and all-seeing, wasn’t officially aware of his side hustle, he said. Still, he said he frequently asked forgiveness for his errant behaviour and took solace in the “fundamental principle in Islam, that the mercy of the Almighty Allah supersedes his wrath”.
In a country where the population of about 200 million people is split almost evenly between Muslims and Christians, it’s little surprise that gambling has been frowned upon. Yet today its presence is hard to miss, whether it’s the football legend Jay-Jay Okocha talking about “That Feeling” in a ubiquitous ad campaign for BetKing, the betting company billboards on major highways, or the social media influencers who tell you how much you could earn from staking even the smallest amounts. One betting chief executive, whose company is one of Nigeria’s biggest bookmakers, said there was no doubt about what has been the singular defining factor in the surge of sports betting. “We have people who would ordinarily not place a bet who now gamble,” the CEO said. “From housewives to office workers looking to make an extra buck, everyone is now in on it. That wouldn’t have happened without the internet.”
There’s another important factor. Nigeria is living through its worst economic crisis in a generation, with inflation running at nearly 23 per cent and six in 10 people below the poverty line. Online betting taps into the distinctly Nigerian belief that, with sufficient faith and prayer, better days could be just around the corner. The chief executive told me that in the absence of security being provided by the government, “Betting offers the same thing as religion. It provides hope.”
Some Nigerian pastors have tried to warn about the ills of gambling, hoping their status as trusted pillars of society will dissuade their congregations. In a sermon posted on YouTube, Lagos-based Prophet Joel Ogebe, a pastor with more than 150,000 followers on Instagram, said: “The poor needs hope; the poor doesn’t think quickly. If you can brandish anything like hope, the poor will rush it.”
But the growing cottage industry of betting influencers on the Nigerian internet is perfectly placed to fill the gap. The biggest channel I found, “Mr Banks Free Channel”, has nearly half a million subscribers. A recent first message of the day, written in all caps, was part prayer, part millennial affirmation. “I AM WALKING INTO THE MOST ABUNDANT, BALANCED, WEALTHY AND SUCCESSFUL YEAR OF MY LIFE,” it said. “I NATURALLY ATTRACT GOOD FORTUNE, AND I AM WEALTHY IN MORE WAYS THAN ONE. I GIVE MYSELF PERMISSION TO PROSPER, AND I HAVE THE POWER TO BUILD THE LIFE THAT I DESIRE.” The group was filled with messages of appreciation. A follower named Michael wrote: “Thank you Mr banks you have no idea what you saved me from yesterday I promise you ”
BoomBetNG likened the relationship between influencers and gamblers to how Nigerians follow their pastors or imams — a case of no questions asked. When I asked why a veil of secrecy still surrounded gambling if everyone was doing it, a knowing smile crossed his face. “It’s the way we are as Africans,” he said. “Even though we’re doing things, we still maintain that belief that it is not right. It’s circumstances that have made you do it, it’s not something you want to do and you want to keep it secret.”
On a Saturday morning, I took a drive to Magodo, towards the edge of the Lagos mainland. The neighbourhood was dreamt up almost three decades ago as part of plans by the Lagos government to spread the city outwards as its population grew and it has since morphed into a relatively middle-class cluster of residential estates with a thriving self-contained mini-economy.
I found a betting shop in a plaza and waited as punters sauntered in. It was match day, with a full calendar of big games across Europe’s top leagues. The shop was small and dusty, with several small televisions of dubious quality hung on the wall. Sitting behind a tall wooden demarcation was a youthful-looking shop attendant whose job it was to take bets. Kayode told me he had worked in betting shops for almost a decade. “Please, no sleeping here”, read a sign on the wall.
It was just gone 10 in the morning but young men in football jerseys — German team Bayer Leverkusen, Italian giants Inter Milan, plus the usual mix of Arsenal, Chelsea and Manchester United shirts — streamed in, having seemingly rolled out of bed just to place their bets before the day’s games kicked off.
The men (it is mostly men here) made their way to the counter, scribbled betting slips in hand, hoping for success. A betting industry contact I spoke to told me the average Nigerian punter stakes vanishingly small amounts in the hope of outsized returns. Most websites allow wagers as low as N100 (7 cents). With an economy in crisis and most gamblers possessing little disposable income, it is a deliberate strategy. The betting chief executive said that while the amounts mean little individually, they eventually stack up when many thousands of people are allowed to play.
A middle-aged man who gave his name as Kingsley caught my eye. He was older than most of those I’d been watching all morning, and not wearing a football shirt. A security guard at a nearby supermarket, he had come to place his bets before beginning his shift. He had two slips in hand, both for N1,000 bets.
A slow-talker with a conspiratorial bent, Kingsley said he had noticed he’d been winning less since gambling took off on the internet. When I asked what he meant, he laughed as if astounded by my naivety. “You can’t beat the computer,” he said sagely, before suggesting that the sporting leagues and bookmakers colluded in order to fix football matches, leaving punters holding the bag.
I discovered that Kingsley wasn’t alone in this belief. The influencer Mr Banks recently put out an alarming warning in Trump-style all caps to his followers. “If you fall for cheap scams, you are an idiot! No one can guarantee you wins, stop paying for VIPs and fixed games!!” The message seemed to confirm that there were a lot of people who believed they could pay someone to receive guaranteed results for football matches yet to be played thousands of miles away.
At another betting shop in Magodo, there was a sign in all caps warning punters that “DROPPING OF PHONE ONLY LASTS FOR 48 HOURS”. I beckoned to the shop attendant behind the glass, Nonso, to explain. There were, Nonso informed me, gamblers who would hand over their phones in exchange for staking money they did not have. If they won their bet, they’d get their phones back and repay the amount loaned to them by the betting shop from their winnings. However, many lost and ended up giving up their phones after 48 hours if unable to rustle up the cash to repay their loan. When I told Nonso this felt like an uneven trade given the value of a mobile phone, he acknowledged the imbalance, but said gamblers were fully aware of the risks they’re taking.
The legal age for gambling in Nigeria is 18 but bookmakers I spoke to admitted there was little way to enforce it, especially online. All bookmakers carry messages advising bettors to “gamble responsibly”. Children as young as 10 gambled, an executive told me, sometimes getting an adult to set up an account on their behalf. The government set the legal gambling age but have so far done little to warn against the growing scourge of problem gambling.
Some told me there is a sense that influencers were happy when their followers lost, as it meant more money accruing to the betting companies, who in turn cut the influencers in. BoomBetNG admitted that some influencers and bookmakers had revenue-sharing agreements that were dependent on how much money punters won or lost. He assured me his deals with bookmakers were for fixed monthly payments, unconnected to how much money his followers made from betting. “Genuinely, I want to see people win. When people win, I’m happy. The main aim of an average bettor is to win, so why would I mislead you? It’s wickedness,” he said.
He said he had seen disturbing things in his time as an influencer. He described several incidents of people pleading with him and tagging him on X to gift them amounts as little as N1,000 (65 cents) for something to eat, all the while asking for betting codes to play. Did influencers like him, who enjoyed a relationship with gamblers and were also paid by bookmakers, have an obligation to warn people more sternly of the risks of gambling? “We tell people to bet responsibly and with what they can afford to lose,” he said. “Don’t borrow money to bet and play with your spare money. But we know people don’t follow it because having the discipline to set a budget for yourself is hard.”
Match day can be fraught with anxiety for BoomBetNG. Not only does he have his own bets to worry about but there’s the responsibility for the thousands who flock to him for guidance.
Success often depends on multiple results across different leagues going right for him and his followers, what’s known as an accumulator. So instead of the immediate thrill of knowing one game is won or lost, it becomes a waiting game. There’s an eerie silence on his Telegram channel as events started to unfold slowly, gradually building to a burst of hectic activity as the weekend drew to a close.
On one recent weekend, the mood was gloomy on the channel as three accumulators were ruined by unfavourable results in Turkey and France. But BoomBetNG knew his followers would be back, in hope more than expectation, seeking once more to tap into his fount of betting wisdom.
He worried about his followers. “Many people are addicted and don’t know when to stop.”
But he had also learnt to take a more detached approach: “I’m making money from [influencing]. Money I make from gambling is extra because I make money from the partners. I tell people this: if betting weren’t a business for me, I’m so sure I wouldn’t be spending so much money on it as I do.”
Aanu Adeoye is the FT’s west and central Africa correspondent
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