CRICKET SA IS ROTTEN – HAS TO BE CLEANED UP
CRICKET SA in the last few weeks has been in the news for all the wrong reasons. Ditto Western Province (WP) rugby. To say both entities currently represent a shambles is not an understatement.
Cricket SA’s race-related comments from acting chief executive Kugandrie Govender, a week ago, that employment would be exclusive to black consultants only added fuel to an out-of-control racial fire in South Africa.
Cricket SA, through an interim chief executive, did not need to make an emphatic statement about inclusiveness and exclusiveness.
I’d like to think that since 1991’s unification of cricket in South Africa, an emphasis naturally would have been on black employment.
The fact that nearly 30 years after unification, Cricket SA released a statement clarifying black employment contradicting Govender’s comments in an attempt to defend her simply sums up the chaos within South African cricket.
SA Cricket Magazine editor Ryan Vrede wrote a powerful column about his confusion with it all. Vrede is not the only one confused.
Govender a week ago said if “there is a particular skill that only a white consultant can offer CSA, then we will use them”.
She continued: “We need to ask ourselves: Could we have employed a black person in this position? We are not saying we don’t want any white people.”
In effect, she was speaking about affirmative action and a transformed view of the organisation, something that was said in the early 1990s.
When the media reported Govender’s comments, Cricket SA took the moral high ground, when at a time the words “Cricket SA and morality” certainly aren’t bedmates.
Given the lack of integrity within Cricket SA, the use of words and contradictions in the statement should not have been surprising.
But still it was significant because it spoke of “sadness” in the leadership’s reaction to the reporting of the comments.
What the statement should have reflected was the accuracy in the reporting and an acknowledgement that if, 30 years after unification, this kind of statement has to be made public then something has been awfully rotten for the last three decades.
The statement also sold affirmative action in the guise of transformation, which it said was one of the five pillars on which Cricket SA is built.
Quite frankly, it read like absolute BS.
It was nonsense because if transformation was one of the five pillars, we’d not be having this discussion and I wouldn’t be writing this type of column in 2020.
Did those who scripted the words look in the rearview mirror to see who and what they were spinning a yarn for? Clearly not.
Cricket SA is rotten and it has to be cleaned up. Personal agendas have been serviced and continue to be serviced in the guise of transformation and affirmative action. Transformation and affirmative action, particularly in South Africa, should be a way of life and not something that gets measured per event or occasion.
If Cricket SA has work to do, then the same is true of WP Rugby. There simply is no justification for the appointment of Ebrahim Rasool as the new chairman of WP.
The province, in terms of professionalism, desperately needs the acumen of a business individual who can provide leadership.
What those who govern the sport in WP have given their supporters is a man whose tenure as the premier was tarnished by allegations of corruption and bribing journalists to write flattering stories about himself and harmful ones about his rivals.
The decision explains the angst among players, coaches and supporters of WP and the Stormers, just as Cricket SA’s leadership stumbles continue to scare the cricketing community.