Ken Borland

The South African Cricketers’ Association – the players’ union – are mulling taking legal action under the Promotion of Access to Information Act (PAIA) to ensure Cricket South Africa release the forensic report that led to the dismissal of former CEO Thabang Moroe, SACA chief executive Andrew Breetzke revealed on Wednesday.

CSA postponed their AGM scheduled for September 5 with one of the reasons given being that there were so many unresolved issues arising from the Fundudzi forensic report into Moroe. Up till then, the Members Council, who had commissioned the investigation, had not been allowed to view the report unless they travelled to Bowman Gilfillan’s offices in Johannesburg and signed a non-disclosure agreement.

Members of the Members Council were optimistic that they would now be allowed to study the outcome of the report they instituted, with relaxed conditions, but it seems that has not been the case. The secrecy behind the report has led to growing frustration amongst the cricket-loving public and other stakeholders, with speculation now rife that the report also implicates Board members and company secretary Welsh Gwaza in misgovernance.

Speaking on a Daily Maverick webinar on Wednesday, both Breetzke and governance expert Judith February, a lawyer based at the Institute for Security Studies, called on the Members Council to demand their right to see the report is respected, failing which SACA will need to launch legal action.

“In December/January there was already enough information for a proper investigation but everything was linked to the forensic report, which was a mistake. They could have dealt with Thabang Moroe back then and South African cricket would have been in a better position now. What our cricket desperately needs now is certainty and consistency as we move into a very difficult time for the game.

“We have formally asked CSA in the past to release the report, but obviously that has not happened. We are stakeholders in that report because of the breakdown in CSA’s relationship with SACA and if it is not forthcoming in the next two to three weeks then we will have to go the legal route and apply under PAIA. There will be no peace in South African cricket until that report comes out,” Breetzke said on Wednesday.

“CSA don’t seem to understand that they operate in a democracy, they appear to be tone-deaf to the fact that the public have a stake in the game,” February said. “At the moment it feels like the public is totally disregarded, and CSA have a lot of work to do to restore their faith. When an organisation is very badly managed and has the wrong people in power, people who abuse power and mismanage finances, then it leads to a forensic report.

“The Members Council commissioned that report and it is bizarre that it is being kept secret. because it is being so closely guarded, we can only assume that it implicates others. But that report will come out because we live in a democracy and the public, the players and the stakeholders in the game have the right to know. A PAIA request is the way to go because the report is certainly in the public and players’ interest,” the former head of IDASA’s governance programme said.

February said the governance of CSA was so terrible that the Members Council should immediately dissolve the Board.

“CSA have lurched from crisis to crisis and there have been rumblings all over about how bad their governance has been. The wake-up call that something rotten was going on came when journalists’ accreditation was withdrawn. That clearly showed they were an organisation insecure in power and closed off to the public, that set off all sorts of alarm bells.

“The Nicholson Inquiry was quite clear that it wanted nine non-executive independent directors with real skill and gravitas, but the Board has been seven non-independent and just five independent directors since 2013. The Members Council should dissolve the Board. And the company secretary [Gwaza] has also become extraordinarily powerful, which is unusual to say the least,” the Visiting Fellow at the Wits School of Governance said.

Spinner Tabraiz Shamsi says the Proteas are seeking lessons from the past in order to ensure that they improve as a team, which is why the honest conversations they had at their recent culture camp have proven to be so valuable.

“The biggest thing for me from the camp was that as a group we realised that we can gain a lot of strength from communicating properly with each other. As hard as it is, it was really important as a group to discuss racism and race because it is a big part of our history in South Africa and we were divided in the past. Previous players have spoken about things being unequal so they had to go through hurdles that should not have been there if it was a level playing field.

“We need to look at the past and take the good things and add to them so that we are even more successful. We want to get better as a team and having so many young players is not necessarily a bad thing, it makes us a bit of an unknown package. But at the same time we need to make sure those hurdles are taken away from the system, they cannot be tolerated,” Shamsi said on Monday.

With the retirement of so many stars of the last decade like Hashim Amla, Vernon Philander, JP Duminy, AB de Villiers and Morne Morkel, the Proteas are going to be suffering from a lack of experience in the immediate future, but Shamsi is confident they are well-equipped to get through the tough teething stages of a rebuilding team and re-emerge as a powerhouse in world cricket.

“Most of our senior players retired in a clump and you can’t just replace that experience, it leaves a massive gap. For whatever reason, we didn’t have the youngsters learning below them and then coming through to replace them seamlessly and it might be difficult at first to perform consistently. But it’s not all doom and gloom and I am very comfortable with where we are as a team and the direction we’re going in. “We want to create a bubble for ourselves in which we can fight for each other and our country, now that we all understand where we’re coming from. I learnt a lot personally at the culture camp, there were things I did not know. I’m sure it was a good learning curve for management as well and we now understand each other much better. We’re definitely stronger than we were before the camp,” Shamsi said.

From boozy evenings in top London hotels, which then led to potential sponsors being kept waiting the next morning, or extravagant weekends at luxurious places like Zimbali, to the financial disaster of the Mzansi Super League being given to the SABC for free, there was an awful amount of money wasted by Cricket South Africa in the couple of years leading up to December last year.

There were other factors at play which led to a predicted budget deficit of R654 million, which some believe should be closer to a billion rand, but such largesse certainly didn’t help and if fired chief executive officer Thabang Moroe was guilty of credit card abuse as charged, then certainly the life of excess being lived by CSA’s top executives did not match the message of frugality they were preaching.

Given that history, it is highly ironic (if I wanted to be unkind I would say hypocritical) that shots are now being fired in the direction of Proteas consultants Jacques Kallis and Paul Harris for allegedly earning inflated salaries due to their appointment by their old skipper Graeme Smith, now the director of cricket.

Of course this narrative should be seen as part of the campaign the Cricket Capturers are busy with to try and get rid of Smith. They don’t care about the millions wasted before, but are now shouting the odds about a few hundred thousand rand.

To date, Harris has not done any paid work for CSA since January, which meant he has actually only been on the payroll for two months. Kallis’s situation is the same. But still, they have been singled out as the ones raking in millions that poor old CSA can’t afford to spend.

They are both, as key members of the South African team that went to number one in the Test rankings nearly a decade ago, sought after overseas and other countries definitely pay a higher daily rate than CSA do. But they have both wanted to give back to their former national team and support their globally much-admired captain in his new role.

Of course, it was CSA’s new leadership of acting president Beresford Williams and acting CEO Kugandrie Govender who started all this hoo-ha over consultants when they announced in a meeting with the sports minister Nathi Mthethwa that from now on they would only employ Black consultants, unless there were exceptional circumstances.

This of course was merely an effort to get the sports minister off their backs. It is not a cricketing decision meant to make the Proteas a more competitive force in an international playground that is becoming more and more ruthless and unequal in terms of the richer nations pulling away from the rest. And I don’t see it being an enormous game-changer in terms of transformation either.

When it comes to transformation, CSA have an extensive history of box-ticking exercises that have made little difference to the horribly unequal situation on the ground, at grassroots.

The Social Justice and Nation-Building project, however admirable its intentions, could end up as another one of these box-ticking exercises. Designed to quell the anger that was fanned by those campaigning to get rid of Smith, head coach Mark Boucher and former acting CEO Jacques Faul, it will also pay reparations to cricketers who feel they were discriminated against.

This could create a headache of industrial proportions for the ombudsman, Advocate Dumisa Ntsebeza, who will have to decide who has genuine grievances and who is merely after some extra money. Many of the most vocal critics of past selection have been those who have shown their lust for money by getting entangled in matchfixing.

I would not be surprised if Ntsebeza also finds himself inundated with applications from White cricketers who feel they have been discriminated against due to the quota system. He is clearly an extremely capable legal brain, but I do not envy the hot potato CSA have given him.

Throwing money at problems is an easy way out of actually having to change the system in order to fix the problem. That’s the sort of hard work the CSA Board seem allergic to. Instead of worrying about consultants and getting embroiled in reparation payments for past injustices, how about just following through on the recommendations of the forensic reports they have paid millions to commission?

It is absolutely laughable that only now CSA are looking to fully implement the recommendations of the Nicholson Inquiry that is eight years old! Even then, acting president Williams is in denial and says they have already complied with the vast majority of the recommendations.

Equally absurd was the CSA Board’s efforts to keep the Fundudzi Report from the Members Council. Having spent months saying the report belonged to the Members Council because they initially instigated it, they then turned around and said it was no longer their property! It can only be because the CSA Board is so completely implicated in the misdemeanours that had Moroe dismissed.

Paul Harris, whose expert knowledge of the physics of spin bowling has led to him being used as a Proteas bowling consultant, said on Wednesday that he is yet to receive any official confirmation from Cricket South Africa that his part-time services will no longer be used and that allegations he was earning astronomical amounts for his work are ridiculous.

CSA acting chief executive Kugandrie Govender has confirmed that they told the sports minister this week that from now on only Black people would be used as consultants and there has been speculation that the organisation was spending more than a million rand a month to use the services of Harris and batting coach Jacques Kallis.

Harris told The Citizen on Wednesday that while he could not speak for what South Africa’s leading run-scorer was earning, allegations of a million rand were farfetched.

“CSA have not said anything to me yet but all I want is for South African cricket to be better. If CSA or the spinners believe there is someone better to do that then they must go for it, if they feel I’m not the right person then they must use someone else, I have no problem with that. I’m sure someone like Robin Peterson would also do a great job, but he’s already got a full-time job as coach of the Warriors.

“I also have a full-time day job and since January I have not earned a cent from CSA, even though I’ve been helping the spinners in my own free time. Just the other day I was sent 10 videos and asked what I think, which I’m happy to do for nothing. Consultants generally get paid a higher rate per day than a full-time employee because they only work so many days in a month.

“But I don’t see how the consultants’ fees could add up to a million rand a month. In terms of myself, I earned nowhere near that, not even a quarter of that amount. I only worked 20 days for the Proteas over the whole of last summer,” Harris told The Citizen on Wednesday.

Harris was initially appointed as the spin bowling consultant after South Africa’s number one Test spinner Keshav Maharaj requested his help, and has subsequently been profusive in his thanks for the help of the fellow left-armer who played 37 Tests and played a key role in the Proteas gaining the number one ranking.

And it is not just Maharaj who Harris has been helping, the 41-year-old businessman now building relationships with the other spinners to match the great one he has with the Dolphins star.

With CSA adopting what would now seem to be a “No thanks, we’re fine” attitude towards enlisting the help of many White Proteas who took the country to number one across all three formats less than a decade ago, it is worth noting that South African consultants are paid considerably less than those former players who are helping countries like England, Australia and India.