After the long court battle between National Lotteries Authority (NLA) and Airtel Ghana over Airtel’s Freedom to Dream promotion, the two have finally buried their differences and launched a new SMS lottery called ‘WOW’. The game allows Airtel customers to text the word ‘WOW’ to short code 7220 at a premium rate of 60Gp and stand the chance of winning GHC500 daily, GHC10,000 weekly and two houses as grand prize by the end of March 2012. There are other prizes such as Airtel airtime, laptops, Samsung Galaxy tablets and Samsung Galaxy phones to be won during the ten-week lottery, and winners would be drawn every Saturday. Corporate Communications Director of Airtel, Donald Gwira told Adom News “now there is no more battle between us and NLA – we met and talked and decided to bury our differences and work together for our mutual benefit and for the benefit of our customers,” he said. Asked if Airtel conceded that indeed their previous games of chance constituted lottery as the NLA argued, Mr. Gwira said “no party conceded to anything, we just felt it is proper to work together rather than fight so that is what we are doing now.” But Board Member of NLA, Mr. Kojo Graham told Adom News the two parties met and it was obvious to the Airtel team that indeed there were lottery elements in their previous games so they agreed to work with NLA on any game of chance that had those elements. He said NLA had no intention of stopping telecom operator or any organisations from organising games of chance for their customers but they insist on those games being organised in accordance with the National Lotto Act, Act 722, which gave NLA the authority to sanction or participate in such games for national benefit. NLA has another issue with Vodafone over the Vodafone ‘More Money’ promotion, which was stopped with a court action. But Mr. Graham said NLA was willing to patch up those differences and collaborate with Vodafone as well. He also said NLA looked forward to working with all the telecom operators on such games of chance for mutual benefit and for the benefit of the country. Mr. Graham said the NLA was working towards organizing games in which customers of all telecom operators could participate through a common short code.