Ken Borland

Cricket South Africa on Thursday officially parted ways with their chief executive Thabang Moroe, announcing that he has been fired with immediate effect for serious misconduct, but the size of his misdemeanours is only likely to be revealed in the coming months as the dismissed administrator’s legal team have already indicated they will fight his axing in court.

CSA’s brief statement on Thursday said the “decision was based on expert external legal opinion supported by the findings emanating from an independent forensic investigation” but they gave no details of what exactly Moroe had done wrong. And the CSA Board have already rebuffed requests for the forensic report to be made public, including from their own Members Council, which is scheduled to elect a new Board on September 5.

Many believe the report implicates the Board in many of the things Moroe has been punished for, a perception his legal team have supported.

At the time of his suspension, way back in December, Moroe had presided over a huge deterioration in CSA’s relationships with key stakeholders such as the players’ union, sponsors and media. He was also accused of excessive credit card spending and procurement irregularities.

The forensic investigators, Fundudzi Forensic Services, interviewed a range of stakeholders before submitting their report in May, since when CSA have supplied numerous different excuses for not finalising the matter more timeously.

Tellingly, Moroe did not avail himself of the opportunity to be interviewed by Fundudzi, a point CSA were quick to highlight in their statement on Thursday.

“Mr Thabang Moroe was offered sufficient opportunity to provide representations to the independent forensic auditors and to the Board regarding the allegations of misconduct, which opportunity he failed and/or refused to utilise,” the statement read.

Moroe’s legal team are likely to include this in any legal action they take, given that they also targeted the chairperson overseeing his disciplinary hearing, demanding that they be replaced by an independent figure.

As much as the CSA Board may now believe the Moroe matter is done and dusted, there are numerous parties who are determined to ensure the forensic report is made public, and the axed CEO will certainly be using it in his defence. The behaviour of the CSA Board will then be in the spotlight.

Cricket South Africa are hopeful that club cricketers will be able to return to training in the next month or two, which will be excellent news for the many people who are employed in that sphere even though it is strictly speaking amateur sport.

CSA cricket services manager Eddie Khoza told The Citizen that amateur cricket was very much part of their planning because they were well aware that many people earned a living from the game at that level, and that the grassroots are the foundation of the game.

“At the moment only professional teams have been given permission to play by government and that under strict regulations. But as part of our scenario planning, CSA have implemented a phased approach for the amateur game because it also provides a lot of employment i.e. private coaches. And if we don’t, by the time we get to Level I there might not be any clubs to get back to.

“But the medical protocols required to play at the moment are not really affordable for amateur teams. Which is why we applied for one-on-one coaching in Level III and in Level II five players and a coach are allowed. Hopefully in September/October we can start pre-season activities, by October we can be having a really thorough pre-season for clubs, schools, universities, and we would like all matches to commence on January 1, 2021,” Khoza said.

Amateur cricketers can breathe easy that CSA have not forgotten about them, but they are also trying to ensure that the thousands of club and school cricketers stay safe as well.

“The medical advice we have received is that in order to play competitive cricket again, the players need six-to-eight weeks of training, so October to December will allow that. Many schools and universities have anyway already said that they won’t be having any extramural activities for the rest of the year,” Khoza added.

Contrary to what many may believe given the divisive, awful state of the Cricket South Africa Board, the Proteas’ ‘changeroom’ is actually quite a happy, unified premises at present according to two Black members of the squad who attended the culture camp that ended last weekend.

While the Proteas are unlikely to sit in an actual changeroom in the near future due to the Covid-19 pandemic, they did spend last week together in Skukuza in a culture camp, which by all accounts was time well spent strengthening the bonds within the team, especially given all the ugliness and bitterness that characterises the administration of the game at the moment.

“We are in a good space and we were even before the camp. But it was a nice exercise for us to all get together and discuss the way forward. Various things were discussed, whatever people felt they needed to talk about,” one Black Protea told The Citizen on Monday.

“The culture camp was good, it was all about the team and what with everything happening at CSA, that’s all we can focus on. There were lots of good, honest chats and when you’re losing, any issue seems to be magnified. Rome wasn’t built in a day, but the platform is there. Team culture is the big thing and we want to drive that not just at national level but domestically too,” a Black African Protea told The Citizen.

And, vitally, it is the players themselves who have been put in charge of ensuring there is a healthy culture within the side. That culture will also play an important role in ensuring that disaffected players feel empowered to speak out without worrying about losing their place in the team.

“Management wanted the players to drive it and nobody was pushed towards having a certain belief. It’s not about being comfortable in the team but about a player being able to say he feels hard done by. It’s important to have a platform to speak about those things and not be judged. In the past players were worried about their position in the team if they spoke out.

“We are trying to drive a culture where nothing will be held against you. For instance, I can only judge by my experience and if I’ve had good experiences with Mark Boucher as coach, it’s not for me to say that others are wrong if they say they have not had good experiences. We have a template now at least and we will continue to work on it. Win or lose that culture must still be driven by the players,” the Black African said on Monday.

The Cricket South Africa Board have brought in the services of a PR company to help polish their tarnished image, which is so bad at the moment that not even all the distractions of a racial witch-hunt have been able to disguise their complicity in the ugly shambles that the beloved game in this country has become.

Of course CSA have also engaged the services of a quarrel of lawyers to help them handle the numerous legal issues they are dealing with, the most recent of which is their failure to appear before parliament’s sports portfolio committee as scheduled on Friday.

The forensic report into the activities of suspended CEO Thabang Moroe and whether the Board itself is implicated in any misgovernance was bound to have been a hot topic in parliament on Friday, but CSA cried off and begged for a postponement because they said the report is not yet ready to be made public.

My legal friends tell me this is probably above board because if serious allegations are made by the report, it would need to be sent by CSA’s Audit and Risk Committee to lawyers in order to ensure due process is followed. But given that the report was finalised at the end of June, progress in this crucial matter has been glacial. Perhaps the sports ministry should apply some ‘global warming’ to the backsides of the recalcitrant administrators, whose behaviour is certainly indicative of people who have something to hide.

But more important than any PR company or even lawyers, CSA have to take notice of what their players are telling them. Their services are the very lifeblood of the game; without our top cricketers, the Proteas slide down the rankings, sponsors, crowds, viewers and broadcasters disappear, and the money dries up. Although that would surely chase away the self-serving vultures feeding on the game, it also creates a vicious circle because with less money, teams become less competitive and the cycle continues to spiral down into oblivion.

The current players, apart from showing their support for the heroic Lungi Ngidi and Black Lives Matter, have been largely quiet in terms of weighing in on all the issues that have been tearing cricket apart during Lockdown. Their union, the South African Cricketers’ Association, have quite rightly been taking up the cudgel and speaking on their behalf.

But the first few murmurings are starting to emerge of how desperately uncertain and unhappy the players are. There have been numerous reasons for top cricketers to leave this country for greener pastures over the last few years but the possibility of the entire professional game collapsing in this country could see the floodgates really open and get that vicious cycle spinning out of control.

While hearing those former players who are speaking out about previous discrimination and the pain it has caused is important and valuable, we have heard way too much from people who have either disgraced the game or who have based their accusations on factual inaccuracies.

I believe these charlatans have been pushed to the front of the choir to further the Cricket Capture agenda which has been in place ever since Moroe and his allies on the Board and in CSA management set it in motion.

Moroe’s temporary replacement, Jacques Faul, has now given up his efforts to clean up the game, forced out by a Board which actively worked against him. Director of Cricket Graeme Smith is clearly now the main target because there have been way too many spurious allegations made about his time as captain. Lest we forget, under his watch the Proteas became the best team in the world in all formats and were at their happiest in terms of unity and embracing diversity.

SACA are now coming under fire too and this fits in perfectly with Moroe’s agenda. The suspended CEO stated clearly his intention to destroy the power and influence the players’ union had in the game. He was trying to achieve this by causing racial divisions, having tried to engineer a split with all the Black African players leaving SACA. Sound familiar in terms of what is now happening?

Fortunately SACA have had a strong president and servant of the game in Omphile Ramela.

There is still hope for South African cricket. We still have incredible playing talent and there is so much love for the game in this country. South African sport has produced many tremendous administrators so they are out there.

But it is getting late. Short of doing what one provincial president recommended to me – “the CSA Board is now in such a bad place that in our culture we say you have to slaughter a goat to cleanse it” – one can only hope the CSA Members Council do the right thing at the AGM on September 5 and vote in people who are committed to saving the game, not parasitizing it.