Eighteen months after Nigeria’s Supreme Court ruled that the regulation of lotteries and games of chance falls under state rather than federal authority, the country’s gambling industry is being reshaped — but the pace of change is far from uniform, and several fundamental questions remain unanswered.
The November 2024 ruling voided the National Lottery Act of Nigeria and confirmed that state legislative assemblies hold the authority to regulate gambling activity within their respective jurisdictions. It resolved a case that Lagos state had brought to the courts 16 years earlier, seeking a definitive ruling on which tier of government should oversee gambling across the 36-state federation.
“The Supreme Court’s decision was constitutionally seismic,” says Adewumi Salami, legal director at DLA Piper Africa. The practical consequences, however, are still playing out — and unevenly.
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States ahead of the curve
At least 10 states were already operating their own regulatory frameworks before the ruling, meaning they were positioned to exercise exclusive regulatory authority immediately. Lagos, Akwa Ibom, Anambra, Cross River, Delta, Imo, Ogun, Ondo, Oyo and Rivers states all had relevant legislation in place. Lagos in particular, through the Lagos State Lotteries and Gaming Authority, was able to move forward without the uncertainty of a dual regulatory regime.
Among those that responded after the ruling, Osun state passed the Lotteries and Gaming Bill into law in November 2024, establishing the Osun State Lotteries and Gaming Board. Anambra is among those that have similarly tabled Gaming Bills. Others are still in the process of drafting legislation — creating a patchwork regulatory landscape that operators are having to navigate carefully.
A $1.6 billion market in transition
Nigeria’s gambling industry reached a total gross win of nearly $1.6 billion in 2025, according to H2 Gambling Capital — a figure that reflects the enormous appetite for gambling entertainment in Africa’s most populous nation.
Football betting has historically dominated, driven by intense passion for the English Premier League, the UEFA Champions League and domestic matches. Brands like Bet9ja and SportyBet have built enormous audiences through mobile applications and aggressive advertising campaigns. But the landscape is shifting. Online casino products — including slots, live dealer games and crash-style titles — are increasingly appearing alongside sports betting apps, with many operators now treating casino gaming as an integral entertainment layer rather than a separate vertical.
For players navigating this evolving market, the emergence of trusted online casinos operating under properly issued state licences represents a meaningful step forward. Trusted online casinos provide certified fair play, secure payment processing and genuine consumer recourse — protections that were harder to guarantee under the previous federal framework and that remain unavailable through the unlicensed offshore platforms that have historically served Nigerian players.
The religious grey zone
One of the most significant unresolved challenges is the absence of gambling legislation across Nigeria’s predominantly Muslim northern states. With Muslims comprising 56.1% of Nigeria’s population as of November 2025 — a figure that has grown substantially over the past decade — the regulatory vacuum in the north creates what Salami describes as “a legal grey zone that poses compliance risks for operators seeking to operate nationally.”
The FSGRN’s Subnational Reciprocity Framework goes some way toward filling that vacuum for online gaming purposes, but it does not substitute for enacted state law and cannot bind states that are not members. In practice, operators are advised to conduct careful jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction due diligence before commencing operations in any given state.
The unresolved question of online gambling
Perhaps the most consequential unresolved issue is the constitutional position of online and cross-border gambling. The Supreme Court ruling resolved the offline lottery question — but what happens when a player in Kano accesses a platform licensed in Lagos remains an area of genuine legal uncertainty.
“Each state arguably has jurisdiction over its own residents and can regulate operators targeting those residents,” Salami tells iGB. “The FSGRN’s URC framework is the pragmatic solution to this, but it does not have the force of statutory law in states that are not members. This creates compliance complexity for operators seeking to achieve genuine nationwide reach.”
For trusted online casinos seeking to serve Nigerian players across multiple states, that complexity is not abstract — it is a day-to-day operational reality that requires careful legal navigation, robust compliance frameworks and a willingness to engage with a regulatory environment that is still, in meaningful ways, a work in progress.
What comes next
Nigeria’s post-ruling gambling landscape is one of the most legally complex in Africa — and one of the most commercially significant. The combination of a $1.6 billion market, a young and digitally connected population, rapidly improving mobile infrastructure and a regulatory framework still being written state by state creates both enormous opportunity and genuine uncertainty.
The operators best positioned to succeed will be those that invest in compliance, engage proactively with state regulators and build the kind of transparent, player-centred operations that trusted online casinos are built on. Nigeria’s gambling market is being redrawn — and the players, operators and regulators who navigate that process most carefully will define what it looks like on the other side.
