On Friday evening Cricket South Africa’s lawyers advised the Members Council that, should they choose to defy the Minister of Sport and refuse to appoint and cooperate with the Interim Board of directors, and the Minister cancelled England’s tour of South Africa as a result, then they would have a strong case against him in court.
Let that sink in for a moment.
Nothing that has happened or been said in the last two years of administrative incompetence and negligence more clearly illustrates how little the majority of the game’s highest authority care about the good of the game. Nothing more obviously illustrates how out of touch the majority of them have become.
The possibility of taking the Sports Minister to court should never have come up. But when it did the Members Council should have realised just how deep its collective descent into madness had become. Cancelling the England tour would cost CSA over R70million in lost income. Even if it was ‘legally’ possible to recover that from the Ministry of Sports, Arts and Culture, it would take years. The game would bleed to death.
And yet that is the decision they took. Only two provincial presidents have broken rank. In the case of Eastern Province’s Donovan May, who has spent the last 18 months telling anybody who would listen that the board were “doing a great job” and blaming the “negative publicity” on the media, the u-turn has more than a suspicion of expediency.
That is most certainly not the case with Central Gauteng Lions president, Anne Vilas, who is the most recent addition to the Members Council and both untainted by its lack of governance and unaffected by the madness. “In the best interests of the game, we are 100% behind the Minister and strongly oppose the actions and sentiments of the majority of the Cricket SA Members’ Council’s decision to challenge the Minister,” she said after Friday’s meeting.
“It is our duty to place the game of cricket first in all our decision making and serve the cricketing community to the best of our abilities. With the full support of the CGL
Board, we recommend that the Members Council appoint the interim Board of
Directors and let Judge Yacoob manage any conflict.”
It should be a source of comfort that there is, at least, one sane person in the room. It is, however, a great deal more concerning that she is in such a small minority.
The Minister agreed in last week’s letter to the Members Council.
“None of the grounds mentioned by you... constitute either rational and/or reasonable grounds (not to recognise the interim board). By contrast, there appears to be an attempt to frustrate the process of correcting the many wrongs that exist within CSA which the members council has consistently, and publicly, acknowledged.”
Even his threat to intervene and place CSA under administration had no effect: “I will exercise my powers under the Act and issue a directive in that regard. In the event that you fail to comply with my directive, I will not hesitate to impose the sanctions available to me in terms of the Act. The interim board require your consent, and your co-operation; not your filibustering tactics, and attempts to frustrate it from getting to the bottom of what is rotten in South African cricket.”
Chairman of the Interim Board, retired Constitutional Court judge, Zak Yacoob, was clear about what he believed had transpired:
“I suspect the members council feared administration and the repercussions the minister is now promising, and to avoid that it falsely agreed with the minister and then reneged. In other words, they broke their promise.”
He also said that the MC’s objection to the presence of former CSA chief executive, Haroon Lorgat, was a “giant red herring” and that their concern was more likely the speed with which the Interim Board were doing their work – and what they would find.
“We began interfering too quickly and too soon. They became very uncomfortable. It could be said that we should have bided our time, treated them nicely, pretended that we were going to be good to them. Then they might have confirmed us. Maybe that was a mistake on our part,” Yacoob said with polite sarcasm.
The Members Council told the Minister that there had been a “breakdown in relations” between them and the Interim Board. It is doubtful they ever intended to have a working relationship. CSA’s acting chief executive, Kugandrie Govender, issued instructions to the rest of the executive not to cooperate with the Interim Board and not to respond to any of their queries.
Yacoob said the CSA executive, including company secretary Welsh Gwaza, had been: “…uncooperative, difficult, unresponsive, arrogant and sometimes rude. That has been part of the problem. We have been trying to get information from them, trying to bring them to account,” Yacoob said, suggesting some of the treatment his fellow interim directors had experienced was “hooliganish and thuggish in the extreme.”
“That they've got too much to hide is the only inference that can be drawn. That opinion may be wrong, and they can prove it wrong by saying, 'Come into our offices and look wherever you like, you will never find that we did anything wrong'. If they do that, I will withdraw my opinion and apologise.”
The Minister has been outstanding throughout this debacle, time and time again offering the Members Council the chance to do the right thing. His only ‘mistake’ so far was to issue a statement saying that the Interim Board would ‘report to’ the Members Council rather than ‘provide reports to…’
“I'm quite certain that the minister was saying we should report to them in the sense that we keep them advised of what we are doing, and we try to get everyone together and work together as much as possible. We try and consult with them as much as possible, and we make sure we take them into account in the work that we do. They have interpreted that to mean, wrongly, that we are accountable to them and we must do what they tell us to do. Or what they authorise us to do. And we were not prepared to accept that,” Yacoob said.
So, the Members Council are protecting themselves, their lawyers from Bowman, Gilfillan are ‘earning’ hundreds of thousands of rands and the CSA company secretary – who used to be employed by Bowmans – is suggesting they can win a legal battle with the sports minister.
If any part of that comment is incorrect then I, like judge Yacoob, will apologise and withdraw it. The madness must stop.
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Madness Indeed. Well, at the end of the day this is what happens when people and politicians become involved in the administration of a game they know nothing about, but where there may be a wiff of cash to be stolen though some form of corrupt deal and get paid to fly around the country at someone elses expense. At the end of the day, if you want to know where it went wrong - "follow the moeny" and you will find out. Its a disgrace and yet another microcosm of African Politics at large. THE END.
How did it get to this point? From the welcome we got in India in 1990, to the first 1st against the West Indies, to hosting the Cricket World Cup, hosting the IPL in their moment of crisis..Here we are in a crisis....
The English Tour should never have been considered..CSA cannot arrange games with Zimbabwe, or Namibia, or even Eswatini...
Where is the heavy all demanding sports journalism? The every day heavy pressure by the scribes? It seems that Mr Manners is the only one putting any pressure on the sport.. I have been banned from a number of twitter followers accounts as a result of demanding answers...
Damn right I should, as a tax payer, as a South African, I am damn mad about the whole dogpooh that has become SA sport, Bafana cannot hope to win, Proteas maybe 1 game in 10.. So many sports floundering in mal-administration, and many "scribes" publish puff pieces, ego stroking, public relations press releases...
The 4th estate is RIP, it no longer.. Funny as the daughter of the land lord is about to write an exam on the French Revolution, in which journalism is a vital healthy part of democracy, who inspects the fox in the hen house???
Sports journalists should not be afraid of writing tough foot in the fire burned to the ankles stories, that is their role and function, journalists represent me, their audience, we cannot be in the press conference, the sports journalists are my proxy, they ask my questions...
When journalism is allowed to die, so does respect for law, for doing the right thing.. This above anything else is the reason why we are in this mess...
Case in point, Geoffrey Boycott over on Sky Cricket talked about the upcoming tour, never mentioned the issues in CSA, I posted that the tourists might be considered "rebels" I asked why is England Cricket supporting the tour? Rewarding bad behaviour...No reply to that comment from Mr Boycott...But someone from Australia did put a link up highlighting the issues...
What Mr Boycott did was a puff piece, too afraid to confront the very large elephant in the room...I thank Mr Manners for his bravery, at great cost no doubt...I miss local cricket, I miss SA playing, but I want SA to be play clean cricket, in which the right board is doing the right job for the right reason...
Educating children with grift, is not the right reason, sure some compensation is normal, and what the solution is, I am not an expert, I just see a lot of mal administration, and I have a lot of concerns over recent hiring of coaches for certain roles...