President of the Toronto Raptors, Canadian professional basketball team in Toronto, Masai Ujiri has urged African leaders to invest in sport and youth development for all-inclusive development of the continent.
Ujiri said at the just concluded Africa Investment Forum in South Africa.
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Ujiri who is the only President of National Basketball Association (NBA) of African origin in franchise history has worked hard over the past year to scout talent and raise awareness about the success and growth of sports on the continent.
“We should be supporting teams here in Africa, that is what should be our vision in Africa. Sport is the next big thing in Africa,” Ujiri said.
The sports ecosystem should be the biggest thing on our continent and has the potential to create jobs and improve livelihoods. African players are in top leagues worldwide and a former footballer is even president of an African state, Ujiri stated.
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Ujiri, joined Ashish Thakkar, CEO and founder of Mara phones, and Tokunboh Ishmael, co-founder of Aliethiea IDF for a panel session dubbed “Promises made, Promises kept.”
Ishmael and Thakkar were on stage to share their testimonies, while Ujiri urged investors to look at sports and showed off the NBA championship trophy which at the 2018 Forum he had promised to secure.
Ujiri said President Paul Kagame of Rwanda had heeded his call and was providing support and a “push” for sports. In one year only, Kagame had built an incredible arena in the capital Kigali.
“We need to invest in sports, it should be the greatest ecosystem in the planet,” Ujiri said.
Responding to a question about how to get more women involved and whether women stood to benefit, Ujiri answered that putting women in leadership roles only made sense.
When he took over the Toronto Raptors in 2013 as executive vice president and general manager, there were no women at all, except for one secretary.
“And it really offended me. Women run our homes, they are incredible but when it comes to the workplace, we don’t want to give them that power to show their abilities, ‘Ujiri said.
“Now I have hired 15 womn with my organization, and I think it’s important, they give us success. They make us make better decisions,” Ujiri said.
The Africa Investment Forum is a marketplace for project developers, investors, borrowers, lenders, policy makers and public- and private-sector investors to encourage investment in Africa. The 2019 edition, which ran from 11-13 November, closed Wednesday in Johannesburg, South Africa.
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