Southpaw 32: The NBA Has an Autocracy Problem
The Basketball Africa League is exposing the limits of the league's commitment to social and political justice.
Dear Readers,
This week, we’re taking a deep dive into the NBA’s world travels. Although fans and the media alike have praised the NBA’s support of the new Basketball Africa League, the league’s push to become a global brand while attempting to honor its commitment to social justice is littered with pitfalls. We’re discussing basketball today, but corporations around the world are confronting a similar challenge, as they try (and often fail) to reconcile their political and fiduciary commitments. As the example of the NBA’s new league demonstrates, sometimes these commitments are simply incompatible. We hope you enjoy!
-Ian and Calder
In an attempt to grow the game, the NBA is embracing autocracy. Is it worth it?
On May 16, the National Basketball Association’s much-anticipated Basketball Africa League (BAL) is set to tip off in Kigali, Rwanda. Originally scheduled to launch in March of 2020 but postponed because of the coronavirus pandemic, the BAL will become the first NBA-backed professional league outside of North America, featuring teams from twelve different African nations—Angola, Egypt, Morocco, Nigeria, Senegal, Tunisia, Algeria, Cameroon, Madagascar, Mali, Mozambique, and Rwanda—in a 26-game tournament. Following 18 games of group play, the top eight teams will advance to a single-elimination-style playoff, culminating in the first-ever BAL Finals on May 30.
Basketball is, of course, already a global affair, with upwards of 40 professional and semi-professional leagues operating around the world. But the launch of the BAL marks a major step forward in the NBA’s effort to export not just basketball but the league’s particular business model to all four corners of the earth. The payoff for the NBA is clear. Following the collapse of a proposed NBA-backed Chinese league in the early 2010s, the BAL will allow the league to tap into a growing and lucrative African market, generating much-needed revenue at a moment when domestic viewership is steadily declining. The BAL will also expand the NBA’s already-robust talent pipeline in Africa, which has funneled over 80 current and former players into the domestic league.
The benefits of the new league for the citizens of the participating nations are less apparent. The NBA has promised that the BAL will be a historic boon for African basketball, with a league representative claiming that it “will provide a platform for elite players from across the continent to showcase their talent and inspire fans of all ages, use basketball as an economic growth engine across Africa, and shine a light on Africa's vibrant sporting culture." Given that the inaugural tournament has been restricted to a single location—Kigali—because of COVID health restrictions, it seems doubtful the league will in fact become “an engine of economic growth” for anyone other than the NBA and a handful of Rwandan economic elite, let alone all of Africa. If nothing else, though, the league does have the potential to create an alternative talent pipeline for Africa’s huge and increasingly basketball-obsessed youth population that is free from the exploitation and abuse that plagues existing Africa-to-NBA pipelines.
Yet the biggest moral and political hazard associated with the league has to do with something even more basic than the NBA’s vaguely imperialistic promise of economic growth. As The Nation’s Dave Zirin pointed out this week on Twitter, by choosing to host the tournament in Kigali, the NBA has tossed its chips in with the authoritarian regime of rebel-turned-dictator Paul Kagame, the leader of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). In the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide in the mid-1990s, Kagame emerged as the promising new face of post-conflict Rwanda, winning the support of center and center-right politicians like Bill and Hillary Clinton and Tony Blair and pseudo-philanthropists like Bill Gates. In an all too familiar development, though, Kagame’s regime has slowly ossified into a transparently authoritarian one-party dictatorship. Kagame’s government openly targets the RPF’s political opponents, illegally detaining journalists and routinely “disappearing” political dissidents. Rwandan security forces, firmly under Kagame’s control, have been credibly accused of hunting down and murdering opponents of Kagame's regime, both inside of Rwanda and abroad. Basic civil liberties are functionally non-existent, freedom of speech is severely curtailed, and the country’s elections are neither free nor fair.
As the NBA prepares to launch the BAL next month, Kagame's reign of repression is getting worse, not better. Most recently, the regime has come under international scrutiny over the arrest of Paul Rusesabagina, the leader of a loose coalition of opposition parties who garnered fame in the United States as the hero of the 2004 film Hotel Rwanda. In August of 2020, Rusesabagina, who had been living in exile in Texas for the past 16 years, was arrested in Rwanda after being duped into returning to the country under false pretenses, according to an interview he gave to the New York Times. (Human Rights Watch calls the made-for-Hollywood plot behind his arrest—which involved a fake trip to Burundi aboard a private flight from Dubai—a “forced disappearance.”) Since then, Rusesabagina has been held on trumped-up charges of terrorism at the headquarters of Kigali’s metropolitan police department—located less than a mile away from Kigali Arena, where the BAL will host its games.
With less than three weeks until the start of the tournament, the NBA has remained silent about Kagame’s mounting abuses. The league has not explained why it chose to host the league in Rwanda rather than in one of the more democratic African nations, like Senegal or Tunisia, that is also fielding a team for the new league. But given the league’s well-documented coziness with Kagame, though, its decision hardly comes as a surprise. At the 2016 All-Star Game in Toronto, the league invited Kagame to speak at a screening of a documentary about the NBA’s basketball clinics in Africa, inspiring some puzzled and indignant takes from the Canadian press. In 2019, after Kagame attended a Golden State Warriors game at Oracle Arena, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver lavished praise on the dictator, saying that, “President Kagame and his family are very knowledgeable NBA fans, and we appreciate his support and that of other African leaders to grow the game across the continent.”
Most troublingly, the NBA’s decision to stay silent about Kagame’s abuses raises some serious questions about the sincerity of its self-professed commitment to social justice. Since the murder of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police department in the summer of 2020, the NBA has gone out of its way to position itself as the most progressively-minded of all of American’s professional sports leagues, spending considerable capital—both financial and political—to support the Black Lives Matter movement and call attention to racist police practices. But the league’s tacit endorsement of Kagame’s regime casts the integrity of the league’s commitment into doubt. Does the NBA’s opposition to state-sanctioned violence end at America’s borders? Do Black lives matter in Africa as well as at home?
It’s important to be realistic about the forces that drive political progress in the sporting world. The NBA is a corporation, and like any corporation, it exists to grow its profit margins, not to facilitate social and political change. And following the NBA’s botched handling of the geopolitical firestorm over Rockets GM Daryl Morey’s tweets in support of Hong Kong's independence in 2019, it should come as no surprise the NBA is willing to ignore its self-professed political values when a multi-million dollar business opportunity is on the line. In the past few months alone, some of the league’s biggest stars have announced endorsement deals with Chinese companies known to use cotton produced in the Xinjiang region of China—where the government is conscripting Uyghurs into forced labor camps—without so much as a peep of disapproval from the league.
Nevertheless, after a year of listening to the NBA preach the virtues of social justice and equal protection under the law, watching the league make nice with an anti-democratic dictator should be a difficult pill for any self-respecting basketball fan to swallow. “AUTOCRACY” doesn’t look too good stitched to the back of a jersey.
Realistically, it’s probably too late in the game to convince the NBA to reverse its decision. The ink is already dry on the league’s deal with the International Basketball Federation (FIBA), and players are set to arrive in Kigali in the coming weeks. It’s not too late, though, to force the NBA to acknowledge its mistake and take meaningful steps to correct it. NBA players in the U.S. should demand that the league extend its social justice commitments to its new league by publicly denouncing Kagame’s abuses. Fans around the world should put pressure on the league and its corporate sponsors—including Nike—to donate a portion of the new league’s revenues to groups fighting for expanded civil liberties and human rights in Rwanda. Mainstream sports publications should devote serious coverage to the ethical conflicts that hosting a league in an authoritarian state creates for the NBA, rather than unthinkingly parroting the league’s anodyne statements advertising the merits of the new league.
Collectively, basketball fans should send the league a clear message: if the NBA’s capital doesn’t stop at the water’s edge, neither should its values.
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