Key role for advocate Ntsebeza

THE South African cricket season is over, but it’s still a very busy period for the sport in the country.

Cricket South Africa (CSA) have ensured that through dragging its feet over the administrative restructure, they brought the federation to the brink of collapse. Thankfully, that is behind us now. The mechanisms for choosing a new board are in place and a date of the annual general meeting has been set.

And then the work begins. In and among an overflowing in-box later this year will be feedback in the shape of a report or otherwise from advocate Dumisa Ntsebeza, the Transformation Ombudsman, heading up the Social Justice and National (SJN) building project.

The project itself started inauspiciously. Perhaps the attachment of former CSA director Eugenia Kula-Ameyaw – whose brainchild the SJN product was – made many sceptical. Understandably so. Kula-Ameyaw’s time as a director was largely calamitous and she most famously claimed she couldn’t watch cricket because it took too long.

But the SJN project was her proposal; she launched it last July, naming Ntsebeza as the ombudsman and if carried out in the manner that Ntsebeza wants, the SJN will leave a lasting legacy. Strange as it would have seemed in the middle of last year, South African cricket may yet benefit from Kula-Ameyaw’s time as a director.

For that to happen there will have to be brutal honesty from all quarters.

There was last year, in listening to ex-players outline their heartbreaking tales about discrimination in the sport.

Those perspectives, many of which will hopefully reach Ntsebeza’s desk by the end of the week when the deadline for submissions expires, provide a view of a sport that had adopted transformation, rather than genuinely embraced and made it a living part of its existence.

The SJN project, should it really reach its end point with recommendations from Ntsebeza that the new board of directors can implement, will provide an opportunity for the sport to be a more inclusive one.

Broadly speaking South African cricket shouldn’t be so reliant on a few private schools to provide such an overwhelmingly large proportion of its player base, as is currently the case.

It needs to branch out properly into new areas and attract new supporters.

The SJN shouldn’t only challenge just the CSA, but the government too with local government and education, among others, needing to play more active roles in assisting cricket’s growth and long-term sustainability.

“Changes come about because people who failed in the first experiments, went back and tried to achieve a different result,” said Ntsebeza.

“That is what I hope to achieve.”

And if he does, the benefits for South African cricket could be long-lasting.