Mark Fannie Rawaada, welcome back to the program, sir.

Thank you. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.

You've just wrapped up some reporting on basketball on the continent of Africa, Rwanda specifically.

Can you describe the scene you chose to open your story with?

Yeah, I mean it was sort of an interesting scene that struck me the first time I learned about it.

In the summer of 2018, in this gym that's like a small college gym,

2,500 seats.

You've got basically two guys shooting free throws in there.

One of them is Adam Silver, the commissioner of the NBA,

and the other is Paul Kagami, the president of Rwanda.

And they're in this national arena, that's Rwanda's national arena in downtown Kugali,

the capital of Rwanda.

And Kigami at some point says to Silver, like,

I'd really like to host an NBA game here someday.

And Silver and the others are like, look, this place is nice, but it's not nearly big enough to host an NBA game.

And so they make this pitch to Kigami basically, which is build a legitimate 10,000 seat arena that's got all the bells and whistles on it.

And they even suggest there's a way to pay for that, and Kigami seems really into this.

He calls in several of his cabinet ministers, and one of them shows up with plans for a remodel that already existed and he said,

no, never mind that, you're going to the States, and I want you to study and we're going to

to figure out how to build this arena.

Kogami is this sort of complicated figure. On the one hand he is viewed as this sort of heroic figure who helped end a genocide back in 1994 that decimated Rwanda. Voters praise Kogame for rebuilding the country in the aftermath of the 1994 genocide.

I'm voting who because there are many things he has done in the past and now he's continuing to do many things

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