Blame it on a night on the tiles
Perhaps we should blame it on a night on the tiles or Wacky Wednesday, but reports on Thursday that a majority of the Cricket South Africa interim board were opposed to the decision to suspend company secretary Welsh Gwaza defied belief.
Are we supposed to believe that the independent chairman, Justice Zak Yacoob, a former judge of the Constitutional Court, over-rode a democratic vote of the board and went with a minority view?
We know that previous CSA boards have lied about decisions being unanimous when they were not. Or maybe they just struggled with the meaning of the word ‘unanimous’. But this interim board, made up of three directors serving the vested interests of the Members Council, three from the vested interests of the South African Cricketers Association (the players’ union) and Sascoc, and three independents works on majority vote.
It is the only way they can balance all those vested interests and Yacoob undoubtedly knows this is the only way they will be able to fulfil their mandate from the sports minister. Or is Yacoob suddenly not the upstanding bastion of he law he has always been before?
And the interim board have admitted that there were differences of opinion, but it is believed the division only involves a couple of members.
Anyone who has read the Fundudzi Forensic Report can see there is clearly a prima facie case against Gwaza that needs answering; he misled the Board on several occasions. And there is also skulduggery that went on in his office that is not in the Fundudzi Report but of which members of the interim board are well aware.
And then also on Thursday, the acting CEO, Kugandrie Govender, a great ally of Gwaza’s on the CSA Exco, joined him in the dog box because Clive Eksteen, the former head of sales and sponsor relations, had his dismissal in June deemed unlawful by the CCMA.
Apart from yet more legal fees – Gwaza has been directing millions of Rands the way of Bowmans Gilfillan, his former employers, in recent months – CSA are now facing a hefty damages bill. Govender was Eksteen’s line manager and gave evidence against him at the CCMA. Evidence which Eksteen contested and now that he has won, the spotlight will fall on Govender and her evidence.
Former chief financial officer Naasei Appiah and fired CEO Thabang Moroe are also contesting their dismissals but judging by the contents of the Fundudzi Report, the chances of them winning are about as good as the chances of Yacoob having gone rogue and becoming a dictator who wants to take control of cricket.
In the midst of all the legal wrangles the interim board has to sort out, the huge issue of transformation in the national team has once again reared its ferocious head. The previous board approved the increased quotas demanded by the likes of Dr Eugenia Kula-Ameyaw, the independent director who arrived out of the blue, became a powerful figure extremely quickly and has now thankfully disappeared almost as rapidly.
The interim board has now suspended those targets, meaning the Proteas will continue, in the meantime, to play under the same targets, to be averaged out over a season, as last summer.
The problem with the revised targets is that they were formulated without any input from the people on the ground – the coaches and selectors who have to implement them and the players who have to live and work under them. The Cricket Capturers, much like the State Capturers, have done well to hitch themselves to the transformation train, but the absence of any meaningful plan to actually change the game from the grassroots up means it is all just a cynical exercise in ticking the box at Proteas level and gaining the approval of the politicians.
The issue of quotas is a highly complex one and the vital thing is for those who are most affected by them – the players, coaches and selectors – to have the input they deserve.
The administrators in their ivory towers who proposed the increased national team quota of seven Blacks per XI, including three Black Africans, might be surprised by what they hear.
As one Black African Protea said to me this week: “I’m no house n****, but where are they going to find the players to reach those targets?!”