Ken Borland

While birds like the Redbacked Shrike are currently making their way from Sweden to South Africa, one of the country’s most famous sportsmen, Jonty Rhodes, is making the move in the opposite direction and all because of his passion for the grassroots development of cricket.

Rhodes will take over as Sweden’s head coach in November, once his stint with the Punjab Kings XI in the Indian Premier League is done, but he says his work will be far more focused on clubs than on a national team that is currently ranked 43^rd in T20 Internationals.

“In terms of my journey, my focus in the last two years has been on grassroots and the development of cricket and I’ve been to places like Nepal, Malawi, Zimbabwe and some of the smaller cities in India, mostly emerging cricket nations. Initially my focus in Sweden will be on developing coaches, that’s spending time in a better way – coaching the coaches.

“You can get away with any gaps in knowledge if you have enthusiasm and intensity, and I’ll be trying to get kids from other sports and introduce them to cricket, where hopefully they will have a great time and enjoy themselves. We need to share facilities and communities with other sports. It’s not about doing anything fancy, just doing the basics really well,” Rhodes told the Emerging Cricket Podcast.

According to Australian former Commonwealth Games discus champion Benn Harradine, who is now Swedish cricket’s performance director, there has been a feverish interest in the game in the Scandinavian nation over the last two years, with the number of clubs growing from 17 to 78. Rhodes’s contagious enthusiasm will undoubtedly help accelerate that passion for the game.

It was actually Rhodes who made contact with Swedish cricket asking if there was any role available for him, with Harradine saying he found the initial approach difficult to swallow.

“When Jonty first reached out, I thought he was taking the piss! But it’s been really good to get to know the person and Jonty’s tremendous contact network is really going to help us,” Harradine said of their breathtaking signing.

“I’m married to an architect who is a really big fan of the Swedish education system and with four of our six children aged 13, 10, five and three, we are relocating lock, stock and barrell with the family,” Rhodes explained. I have followed European cricket quite closely and I actually hit Sweden up first with an e-mail. I’m not going as a consultant, this is a long-term move.

“As a family we’re looking to make a future in a different scenario, we have our Swedish identity cards already and the entire process is done. I will be going straight to Sweden from the IPL in the United Arab Emirates, from 41⁰ to 3⁰! It’s all been done fairly recently, in the last three months. I have a three-year IPL contract so I will be released for that, but I love the grassroots and growing the game,” Rhodes said.

Cricket South Africa’s Members Council, having studied a summary of the Fundudzi Forensic Report over the weekend, have decided that whatever the governance failings of the Board of Directors were, they are not terrible enough to warrant them stepping aside ahead of the AGM, which has to be held by November 5.

The 14-strong Members Council includes seven members of the Board, an awful structural defect which perhaps made stronger action impossible. Nevertheless, there does seem to be a strong desire for change in CSA’s governance structures and how the Board is constituted. The weekend bosberaad decided that CSA’s Memorandum of Incorporation is to be revised with special attention given to the composition and roles of the Members Council, the Board of Directors and executive management.

But it is the current Board who will be responsible for the implementation of these changes before the AGM.

“The summary of the forensic report was quite comprehensive and covered all the burning issues. Just the litigation-sensitive stuff was kept from us on the advice of legal counsel from Bowmans Gilfillan so as to protect the case they are building against the relevant people. But there was not much in there that should affect the appointment of directors. Not many of the responsible people remain on the Board.

“There are things that could have been done better and some decisions made by the Board were not great. But often they rely on senior management to feed them the information, you trust that information to be correct and then six months later when you discover that it is not, then it’s too late. But I can’t really see why it was kept from the public,” a Members Council delegate told The Citizen on Sunday night.

The Members Council will now have their meeting with Sascoc, who have called for the Board and executive management to stand aside and allow the independent task team they are appointing to conduct an investigation into the affairs of CSA, on Monday evening.

But the practicalities of who would actually be in charge of the operations side of CSA, as well as what is seen as “quite an aggressive overstep by Sascoc”, makes it unlikely that CSA will agree to the Sascoc demand for directors to step aside.

A date for the AGM, originally scheduled for September 5, has not been finalised, but the controversy over the nominations process for new directors was discussed. The process will now be overseen by an interim selection panel comprised of people from both within and outside the game.

The proposed changes to the MOI will all need to be ratified at the AGM.

Sascoc have written a letter to the ICC clarifying that they are not attempting a takeover of Cricket South Africa but have merely requested the sidelining of the CSA Board and certain executives as they look to assist a federation that has obviously been brought into disrepute and no longer enjoys the confidence of their many stakeholders.

The South African Sports Confederation and Olympic Committee informed CSA this week that they were using their step-in rights to intervene in the governance crisis facing the union, leading to speculation that the move could amount to government interference and could lead to the suspension of the Proteas from international cricket because the ICC’s constitution forbids that.

But in an e-mail sent to the International Cricket Council on Saturday, Sascoc have explained their decision to appoint an independent task team to conduct investigations into the administrative, operational and/or financial affairs of CSA and have denied that it is government interference. They remind the ICC of the resignations of directors and that of acting CEO Jacques Faul, as well as CSA’s refusal to make the forensic report into the possible misconduct of their former chief executive, Thabang Moroe, available on an unrestricted basis.

“Given the litany of complaints that has plagued CSA … there can be no doubt that CSA has been brought into disrepute and that its standing amongst players and ex-players, the media, the public and, most importantly, its stakeholders such as sponsors and the government, has dramatically diminished, resulting in a loss of trust and confidence in the organisation.

“The task team will remain accountable to the Sascoc Board and the Members Council of CSA … . There is thus no attempt to place CSA under administration as has been reported. Cricket belongs to its Members and the Sascoc resolution does not disturb that arrangement. What the resolution requires is for the CSA Board and those senior CSA executives who serve it on an ex officio basis to step aside in order to facilitate the work of the task team,” the e-mail signed by acting president Aleck Skhosana said.

As a first step in darning the tear in the fabric of the game at present, Sascoc seem to want to work with the Members Council and their starting point is getting the forensic report released so all the provincial presidents can study it without stringent conditions ahead of an AGM that has been postponed but needs to happen before November 5.

“At no stage … did Sascoc act under the direction … of the Minister of Sport … Sascoc rejects any allegation … that the … intervention constitutes government interference. In this regard, we are quite prepared to meet with you and discuss this issue … to give you the assurance that the Sascoc intervention is a bona fide attempt to assist one of its members who clearly and desperately needs such assistance.

“CSA’s steadfast refusal to make the forensic report available is puzzling, as it appears that they are unable to self-correct if the report is not made available, not only to its own Members, but also to the media and public at large since it is a public document. CSA (like Sascoc) remains accountable to the public at large since we are public bodies … and are required to act in the public interest,” the e-mail to the ICC said.

CSA’s Board of Directors and the Members Council are meeting over the weekend, with the latter body hopeful that they will finally be able to interrogate the forensic report. In a statement released earlier, Sascoc called the failure to release the forensic report to the Members Council “irrational and unreasonable”.

“The Presidents that form the Members’ Council of CSA have similarly been denied unrestricted access to the forensic report. This is quite ridiculous. The Presidents act on a mandate from their respective boards. How are they expected to obtain a proper mandate from their boards when they are not permitted to share the contents of a report which they commissioned with the members of their board? That is why the refusal to make the report available on an unrestricted basis is both irrational and unreasonable,” Sascoc said.

There is a massive irony in a body such as Sascoc, wracked by internal strife and lacking credibility, making an intervention in the affairs of Cricket South Africa, a federation that seems to daily provide a new definition of rock-bottom.

But one can only hope this is a rocket (a spark would have little effect on the thick-skinned people sitting on the CSA Board) that leads to a real shift in the mindsets of those arrogant directors that refuse to budge a centimetre from a place at the top table of a sport they have parasitized rather than served.

If Sascoc threatening to take over does not force the CSA Board into standing down and releasing the Fundudzi Forensic Report, then the next option has to be for them to be threatened with being declared delinquent directors. There have been a litany of governance disasters at CSA over the last couple of years and there is no way they can continue to deny their own involvement and culpability.

There is no doubt people like former CEO Thabang Moroe and company secretary Welsh Gwaza have been involved in malfeasance, but who appointed and enabled these self-serving charlatans? The directors did and they have failed in their fiduciary duties, which have a clear legal basis.

The Members Council and the CSA Board of Directors are meeting together in Johannesburg over the weekend and, as one delegate put it, this is “make-or-break” time for the organisation. Will selfish, individualistic priorities prevail and continue the death spiral into chaos and oblivion? Or will there finally be some leadership and accountability shown?

Either way, Sascoc are going to impose a task team inquiring into CSA’s affairs, which is no bad thing. But if leadership and accountability win the day then there are enough top-class people who love cricket who will be able to step into the leadership vacuum and help CSA back to stability.

One of those is Judith February, a lawyer based at the Institute for Security Studies, the former head of IDASA’s governance programme, a Visiting Fellow at the Wits School of Governance, a trustee of the Nelson Mandela Foundation and a massive cricket fan.

“You cannot be on a board and not take responsibility, resigning just before the AGM is too little, too late because they have presided over matters to that point. Directors have left in silence or written letters, but it was because they did not flex their muscles that Thabang Moroe was allowed to operate in that way. CSA’s Memorandum of Incorporation is very clear and they have breached it on every front.

“We can join the dots intelligently and see that there is something deeply wrong with the system and the people who manage it and the people who oversee them. A clean break is the best option and clearly we need to interrogate why someone of such integrity and capability as Jacques Faul could find no space to work in CSA. The players’ statement about the boardroom shenanigans was also really important,” February said this week in a Daily Maverick webinar discussing cricket in South Africa’s fight for survival.

Does February, a governance specialist and former executive director of the HSRC’s Democracy and Governance unit, not just sound like the perfect candidate to be an independent director on a new-look CSA Board?

There are also some brilliant, impressive people on the Members Council – one thinks of Ben Dladla, Craig Nel, Anne Vilas and Tebogo Siko – who are dong their best to restore the credibility of CSA, but their efforts are being stymied by the presence of seven directors of the Board in the 14-strong Members Council itself.

The Nicholson Inquiry, which the CSA Board have now committed to return to eight years after its release, called for change in how the Board was constituted, recommending nine of the 12 directors be independents.

But in 2013 it was the selfsame Sascoc who refused to accept that and pressured CSA (although it probably suited their Board back then too) into going with a 7-5 split in favour of non-independents. And that’s a major reason why CSA are in the mess they are in now.

Directors without the competence, skills or experience to run a billion-and business have been voted in to ensure certain powerful figures enjoy support and can dispense patronage in return. In some cases, these directors have been earning twice as much from Board fees as from their ‘main’ source of income; no wonder they are desperate to keep their noses in the CSA trough.

In the coming weeks, Sascoc have a vital role to play in supporting the efforts of those who want to change this system and put cricket back in the control of people who firstly love and serve the game, and secondly have the expertise to run it properly.