The former NBA All Star turned federation president used the Unstoppable Africans stage in New York to make a commercial case for sport, and to warn that stadiums built on a Western template will keep losing money.
New York, reported live by Pan African Voice, official media partner of Unstoppable Africa 2026.
The setting
Unstoppable Africa reached its fifth edition at the Marriott Marquis in New York this weekend, convened by the Global Africa Business Initiative with the United Nations Global Compact, drawing close to 3,000 delegates. Pan-African Voice is one of 24 official media partners accredited to the event and is reporting from the floor. Each year the organisers reserve a strand called Unstoppable Africans for stories of individual enterprise. This year’s first honouree was Luol Deng, twice an NBA All Star across a fifteen year career and now President of the South Sudan Basketball Federation.
Six years, and a world ranking
Deng’s numbers carry the argument. He funded the national team personally, covering training, gear and flights in a country with no indoor courts. The federation is six years old. In that time South Sudan has reached the Basketball World Cup and the Olympic Games, climbed from around one hundredth in the world to twenty fourth, and now sits first in Africa.
Results were never the objective. Many of the players he selects he has known since they were eleven or twelve, through camps he ran every summer while playing.
“I never had the opportunity to brag to someone about how good we are at something,”
he said, and that pride is what moves a generation. In the locker room the framing is the same. “This moment right now is going down in history, not because of the score, but because of all these young kids just like you who never got to play at home.”
The complaint he is tired of
Asked how governments should think about sport, Deng went after the continent’s favourite statistic.
“I am really tired of we are the youngest nation…we have youth, we are the youngest nation, and we just keep repeating that.”
The gap is understanding rather than resources. “We have to teach even our leaders and the older generation what really comes out of sports. It is not just a hobby.” A functioning system produces occupied young people, teamwork and scholarships. His academy in South Sudan works with more than a thousand children, and its metric is not professional contracts.
The stadium problem
Deng was candid about why African sports infrastructure so often loses money: stadiums sit idle between tournaments, copying a Western template into a market that does not work that way. “I would not build a stadium and think that I am going to fill it up by people buying tickets,” he said. His alternative is to
put venues where African families already spend leisure money. In Nairobi, families are at the mall. Put an arena alongside that and the asset has a business the rest of the month. Sponsorship, music and an evening economy around the site make it viable rather than ornamental.
Anyone underwriting such a project should size it honestly: two thousand seats or twenty thousand, decided by demand rather than ambition. “Be different, be creative, and do not follow the Western world’s ways of doing things.”
What Kigali gets right
Pressed for a model, he pointed to Rwanda, where his team trains and the BK Arena is maintained, used for multiple purposes, and backed by leadership that treats it as strategy rather than decoration. He credited President Paul Kagame’s support for the Basketball Africa League, and noted that Rwanda hosts neighbouring teams, South Sudan’s among them.
Sports tourism, he added, is closer than most assume. The game is the reason to come to Kigali or Dakar, and the city is what visitors spend on.
The narrow window
The most sobering passage concerned talent lost to paperwork. Somewhere on the continent, he said, is a sixteen year old with everything required, fighting for a visa to reach a better court. Two or three years of that and the window closes. That child may never have become a professional, but might have reached a classroom.
Asked whether other players of African descent should copy him, he declined to make it a template. “I do not think they have to. I do not think they should.” His advice to serving athletes was the opposite of the expected sentiment: concentrate on your own career while the window is open, because if you are not standing on two feet when it closes, nobody is coming to help you.
Pan African Voice tracks the business of African sport, from federation building to what the continent’s biggest names earn.
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