A SPORT AT WAR WITH ITSELF
Cricket SA’s hearings have shone a valuable light on injustice in the sport
Rather than prioritising how to build a team to win a World
A look at how to spend your downtime — from music, to sport, books, the theatre and the screen
Cup, Cricket SA (CSA) has spent the past few years becoming world-class at producing muddles.
The latest concerns the ongoing Social Justice and NationBuilding (SJN) hearings, an initiative that can be traced to last year’s Black Lives Matter movement and the debate it gave rise to about race and exclusion in the very heart of SA cricket.
A frank conversation about race in the game has to be a good thing, no matter how uncomfortable. The problem with the hearings, however, is that the genesis of the idea came from rogue elements within a now-discredited CSA board, including independent director Eugenia Kula-Ameyaw.
Not only did Kula-Ameyaw controversially place an advert for the SJN worth R500,000 in the Sunday Times without board approval, but the subsequent spat led to the resignation of then
acting CEO Jacques Faul.
His departure led to further suspicions that, like many state institutions, CSA was being hollowed out from within by senior managers, such as suspended company secretary
Welsh Gwaza.
That suspicion ultimately led to the resignation of the entire compromised CSA board (including Kula-Ameyaw). The board was replaced at the end of last year by an interim board headed by former judge Zak Yacoob. At the time, the SJN hearings receded in importance (but never entirely went away) as the interim board strove to stabilise the game.
This board wrote a new constitution and subjected CSA employees like Gwaza and former acting CEO Kugandrie Govender to disciplinary processes before firing them.
With its good work all but done and an AGM imminent, the interim board belatedly woke up to the fact that it still needed to deal with the SJN hearings.
But just as the hearings were about to start in May, CSA’s interim board got cold feet and postponed them. An interim board member, who wasn’t in favour of holding these hearings, told me: “We took our eye off the ball.”
Such prevaricating gave the impression that CSA was deeply divided over this process.
In the end, advocate Dumisa Ntsebeza, who would head the process, provided assurances that witnesses would speak (or make submissions) under oath, so the interim board reluctantly gave the SJN hearings the thumbs-up. By now, however, with the interim board’s yeoman work done, there was a newly elected CSA board — and it was this board that needed to handle the SJN hot potato. It faced a dilemma: cancel the hearings entirely and be accused of sweeping things under the carpet, or proceed in the knowledge that, in all likelihood, the hearings would be highly charged and racially divisive, an unstable compound of legitimate complaints and score settling.
It plumped for the latter, and the hearings, under Ntsebeza’s guardianship as the
SJN’s ombudsman, got under way with an opening submission by KulaAmeyaw.
Testimony of two halves
It is in this nuanced context that you need to understand what has come out of the commission. Much has been valuable and necessary, but there has also been a more insidious strain of testimony, aimed at reframing events in a more helpful light for those compromised people ousted in the clean-up.
The witnesses can be divided into two groups. The first, mainly consisting of players already implicated in the domestic matchfixing scandal of 2015/2016 such as Lonwabo Tsotsobe and Ethy Mbhalati, have been cravenly opportunistic, blaming everyone but themselves for the shape of their careers.
Despite bringing the sport into disrepute as match fixers (Mbhalati was suspended for 10 years, Tsotsobe for eight), they’ve alleged that the match-fixing investigation was handled incorrectly. Tsotsobe says he was “coerced” into signing an admission of guilt form, while Mbhalati “never received a charge sheet”.
This, frankly, is nonsense.
The CSA investigation was handled by David Becker and the anticorruption unit investigator, Louis Cole, who painstakingly built their case over 18 months.
Cole travelled to India and England, where he interviewed Alviro Petersen, one of those found guilty in the affair, who was then playing for Lancashire.
Both Cole and Becker, a lawyer who worked for the International Cricket Council, are veteran professionals. Becker, in particular, has a history of speaking truth to power. Tsotsobe and Mbhalati’s allegations suggest rookie errors. Neither Becker nor Cole is a rookie.
But it is the testimony from the second group which will be far more valuable in reshaping the sport.
Here, Omar Henry (SA’s first postapartheid test cricketer of colour) and Ashwell Prince (a world-class top-order batsman) have spoken of spats, racial insensitivity from white players and never feeling entirely comfortable in the inner sanctum.
Paul Adams, the “frog in a blender” googly bowler, spoke harrowingly about having the Boney M song Brown Girl in the Ring adapted by the late-1990s team in which he played to Brown Shit in the Ring.
Mark Boucher, the current
Proteas coach and a wicketkeeper who first played for the team as a 20year-old in 1997, was among those who sang the song.
As Adams put it: “Mark was one of the guys and I only really started to think about these things
afterwards, because I was caught up in the whole fun of being in the team and not wanting to ruffle feathers.”
Boucher submitted an initial 14page affidavit, in which he said he “deeply regrets and apologises for the part I played in joining in with my teammates in singing offensive songs or using offensive nicknames”.
He denied that he came up with the name, adding: “I don’t know who gave him the name.”
But he said he wants to speak to his former teammates one-on-one to apologise.
“I have listened to the hurt some of my former teammates felt, the feeling of exclusion and some totally unacceptable and inappropriate examples of alleged racism that they endured. I apologise unreservedly for any offensive conduct,” he said.
But Boucher’s statement has also focused attention on how poorly CSA, and its predecessors, prepared cricketers for the new post-apartheid team environment.
He said when he first played, “we were not only naive but ill-equipped to deal with the new environment in which we found ourselves. It was six years after SA’s readmission into international cricket.”
Either way, it hasn’t been a good month for the former Proteas wicketkeeper. In August, he lost his assistant coach in the national side, Enoch Nkwe, whom he took over from when Nkwe was unceremoniously deposed as coach in December 2019.
Nkwe didn’t tour the Caribbean with Boucher and the team in June and July. “I was sick and tired of placing cones,” said Nkwe, in a reference to being a glorified fitness trainer.
CSA has promised “an investigation [into] team culture”. But whether this will take place on the eve of or after the T20 World Cup, to be held in Abu Dhabi and Oman next month, remains to be seen.
What would such an investigation prove, however?
After all, Boucher and Nkwe’s lousy relationship was cricket’s most poorly kept secret. Should the board not have proactively addressed the issue before the pawpaw hit the fan?
Battling bankruptcy
The new CSA board, chaired by corruption fighter Lawson
Naidoo, will now be scrambling to juggle the fallout from the
SJN hearings and deal with the Boucher matter fairly. And we should feel some sympathy for Naidoo’s new board, given that it inherited this mess from the interim board, which wrung its hands for too long over whether the hearings should even continue. Needless to say, all of this deflects from CSA’s core business.
Perhaps “juggling” is too active a verb, since there’s a widespread impression that CSA is passive and directionless.
“Who controls the cricket narrative at the moment?” asks a member of the cricket establishment. “It’s not CSA; it’s Ntsebeza and the SJN.
“People forget: the Proteas generate 80% of CSA’s income. If they continue their downward spiral, that hits the bottom line. The only way Boucher will stay is if he wins the World Cup.”
And that bottom line is in serious trouble. The governance debacle at CSA two years ago — including former CEO Thabang Moroe’s awful decision to ban critical journalists — cost CSA several big-name sponsors, including Sunfoil, Momentum, Ram and Standard Bank. Few have returned.
While Betway has, to some
extent, filled the Standard Bank vacuum, sponsors are thin on the ground. As CSA’s recovery lags, big business is yet to be convinced that cricket is a punt worth taking for its brands.
For this 2020/2021 financial year, CSA is expected to record a R250m loss — mainly because tours to SA by the Indian and Australian teams were cancelled, which meant a large chunk of broadcast revenue vanished.
Despite the interim board’s work, public confidence in the sport is at a record low. Naidoo seems
incapable of giving the national team and Boucher the unqualified support they need to succeed at the T20 World Cup. It seems to be easier to promise “investigations”.
So here’s a word of wisdom for the new board from an earlier cricketing age.
Two weeks ago, John Watkins, SA’s oldest surviving Test cricketer, died aged 98. I interviewed Watkins four years ago at his Durban home. Despite eye trouble, deafness, walking with a stick and lower back problems, Watkins was chipper. I asked what the secret of his longevity was and he replied: “You just can’t take things too seriously.”
It seems like a throwaway line, and hardly the stuff of philosophers and sages. But we might heed it today when so much seems wrong in our complicated cricket world. Rather than overthinking it, and becoming paralysed by inaction, maybe it’s the only way to stay sane.