US Basketball Salaries and Liberations in Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso

Wow. Women NBA #1 pick will be paid $338,056 over four years:

• 2024: $76,535
• 2025: $78,066
• 2026: $85,873
• 2027: $97,582

For men, the NBA’s 2023 No. 1 draft pick signed a four-year contract totaling $55 million. That is on average $13.7 million per year. (The 2024 #1 pick is not ready but will likely be in $millions).

This world has no balance at all. During a program in Johns Hopkins University over the weekend, a professor noted that Ivory Coast still pays rents to France for its presidential mansions in the country (I did not believe that, but it seems to be factual). Another bombshell was that some French mining companies in some of these Francophone countries pay taxes to France, not to the African nations!

Where am I going? Follow me. Yes, across most indicators, humans are not optimal animals. How do you pay a young woman $76,535 and a man $13.7 million in the same company? I mean the National Basketball Association is an organization with Women and Men subsidiaries. Even if the men bring 99% of the profits, fairness will demand a boost for the girl wage, say $1 million, over this burger-frying-wage despite the efforts and intensity required for a professional sport.

On the Francophone one, I said I will check the economies of Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso to see if the walls they’re breaking are working. It seems: “According to the IMF, Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso have outperformed the average growth for sub-Saharan Africa in 2023, despite sanctions imposed on them by ECOWAS. The IMF attributes this performance to strategic choices in several sectors of the economy.” Check, those “choices” could be asking companies to pay taxes or leave the country.  How I wish people do not need to do coups for such liberations in the land!

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