Rugby dropping the reform ball

THE RUGBY world cup came and went and South Africans are once again licking their wounds. They have failed to lift the Webb Ellis Cup and there was disappointment which is still lingering, on even now.

One would think that after such big tournaments there would be a post mortem exercise to analyse the root causes of our failure and to address fundamental issues that have an impact on how we prepare, turn up and play the beloved game.

One big elephant in the room in South Africa is the issue of lack of transformation in rugby.

The topic of transformation was a topical issue prior to and during the t our nament, yet after the t o u r nament the silence is now deafening. One would have thought that the issue would be top of the agenda.

Over the years the issue has been frequently raised but nothing substantive happens and we continue to raise it only around major tournaments.

To this day, 21 years after the dawn of democracy, we have never as a nation had a frank conversation about substantive transformation. Instead, our government is unsuccessfully attempting to address the issue through legislation.

Legislation on its own, as is evident, will not address the issue of transformation. Transformation calls for a different approach, it calls for conversations for actions.

For some strange reason, transformation is associated with mediocrity. There is a belief in some quarters, including people from previously disadvantaged communities, that products of transformation are just mere tokens and not good enough to deliver quality. Some black people who are successful do not want to be regarded as beneficiaries of transformation efforts.

We know that in the majority of cases that is a fallacy.

The mere fact that one argues merit to justify where they are suggests that the beneficiaries of transformation lack merit.

Substantive transformation is not tokenism but the advancement of merit to areas that would not otherwise have been possible due to the historical dispensation. In many instances, including corporates, once black people occupy positions of power they disassociate themselves from t r a n s f or mation.

They now see transformation as less important and they kick the proverbial ladder. Until we have successful people coming out of their closets to declare publicly that they are beneficiaries of transformation efforts the stigma of associating transformation with mediocrity will remain.

We should not forget that the white community, especially the Afrikaners, had their own affirmative action measures that guaranteed them positions in various spheres of life.

In fact, the practice still continues to date.

Statistically, a white graduate coming from the same university as a black graduate has more chance of being employed than the latter. They were not born superior as the indoctrination will want us to believe.

Empowered see transformation as

less important

Fellow of the Archbishop Tutu African Leadership Institute Tshwane