The NBA’s announcement that it will be creating a new professional basketball league in Africa was worthy of attention, and getting the G.O.A.T, Michael Jordan to attend the launch during the All -Star Weekend in Charlotte North Carolina illustrated just how serious the NBA was about the venture.
The NBA has already invested on the continent. It has organized Basketball Without Borders — a development camp — in various African countries over the past 16 years, opened an academy in Senegal last year and hosted an exhibition event, the NBA Africa Game, in South Africa three times in the past four years.
Major accounting firms have ranked the NBA among the top four wealthiest sport leagues in the world. Its support of a professional competition in Africa is very much a business move, from which the NBA will want to make money at some point.
‘Huge economic engine’
At the launch, NBA commissioner Adam Silver gave various economic reasons why he wants the organization to grow its footprint in Africa. Six of the 10 fastest-growing economies are in Africa and 438 companies generate more than a billion dollars in revenue, he said.
“Africa is a huge economic engine. One place we haven’t seen huge economic growth is the industry of sport, which is something we are particularly focused on.”
The big picture is clear. NBA Africa managing director Amadou Gallo Fall said the Basketball Africa League — as it’s currently being called — will piggyback on the African Basketball League, which the International Basketball Federation (Fiba), the sport’s global mother body, runs. There are 16 participants in that competition; the NBA wants 12 teams in its new tournament.
Now comes the work of ironing out the details between the NBA and Fiba, which supports the initiative, along with various national federations around the continent.
Creating jobs
The NBA has a lot riding on the league. It has announced support for the tournament from US basketball team owners and major sponsors such as Nike, Pepsi and Disney (The Walt Disney Company owns 80% of sports broadcaster ESPN and basketball has been core to its programming since inception).
“Combined with our other programmes on the continent, we are committed to using basketball as an economic engine to create new opportunities in sport, media and technology across Africa,” said Silver.
Masai Ujiri, the president of Canada’s Toronto Raptors, agrees. “The ecosystem of sport and specifically basketball is incredible. We are going to have jobs being created from this.
As much as any player from this continent — including greats like Nigerian-American Hakeem Olajuwon, Congolese-American Dikembe Mutombo and lately Joel Embiid from Cameroon — Ujiri’s story exemplifies the kind of opportunities the league could create for Africans.
He went from being a kid in the northern Nigerian city of Zaria who first dreamed about playing football to becoming a professional basketball player in Europe, then became an unpaid scout for Florida’s Orlando Magic team before taking up his current position as one of the NBA’s top executives at a team that have been regular play-off participants for the past five seasons.
Citing Embiid and Giannis Antetokounmpo (whose parents were born in Nigeria) as examples, Ujiri said the depth of talent in Africa is enormous.
“There’s a lot of them. It’s just, how do you develop courts? How do you develop leagues? How do you develop programmes? How do you encourage youth? The NBA is doing a magnificent job. We need to do even more,” he told ESPN.
Presidents play ball
There are logistical challenges. There aren’t enough arenas to accommodate a tournament on the scale the NBA is envisaging, but Gallo Fall says they are being built. Hotels, and of course travel, will need to improve drastically. But Ujiri is confident it can be done, saying a pro league will help facilitate this.
Ujiri says that because of the sporting talent present in Africa, upscaling the logistics is inevitable. “The talent is one of the most difficult things to get. If you don’t have it, then it’s a different story. Then you’re just trying to make something out of nothing. But the talent is walking all over and I think that’s special.”
For now, the tournament, which is scheduled to start in March 2020, cannot be expected to compete with the NBA. But more than most private entities, governments or even celebrities, the NBA has always viewed Africa optimistically. It has created development initiatives over many years, improved those programmes, turned kids from those programmes into big-name professionals, brought its biggest stars to South Africa and played more than one exhibition game in the country. The NBA has also supported the Jr NBA program in Africa, a U-15 league that has been running in Uganda on three seasons.
The Basketball Africa League is a serious enterprise. It has the backing of presidents including Paul Kagame of Rwanda, Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya and, notably, former US president Barack Obama, a huge basketball fan.
It also has the backing of Michael Jordan whose Jordan brand is going to be a major partner in making the league happen.
While all this is said and done, we can only scrutinize how ready we as Uganda are. The question is: Do we see the opportunity in it’s entirety for athletes and enterprises? And what are we doing to ready ourselves for a fair share of the spoils both in terms of our basketball development and the economic benefits that basketball – a multi-billion dollar industry provides.
Uganda’s City Oilers will be carrying the banner for Uganda at the Basketball Africa League qualifiers in Tanzania starting October 15. if Oilers can make it to the elite 12, it will mean that all their effort and investment in the club over the past 8 years since their inception will begin to pay off.
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