Ken Borland

Cricket South Africa’s long-awaited AGM will take place on Saturday from 10am and the Independent Nominations Panel will be responsible for appointing the eight independent directors to serve on the new 15-person Board, while the Members Council will elect five of their representatives to become non-independent directors.

Dr Stavros Nicolaou, the chaiman of the Interim Board, revealed on Friday at the handover of their report to sports minister Nathi Mthethwa that the nominations panel was headed by the chairman of the Institute of Directors Muhammad Seedat, and the six members included such well-known cricket figures as former first-class cricketer and match referee, attorney Enver Mall; former ICC and CSA president Ray Mali; and former Proteas pace bowler David Terbrugge.

Nicolaou stressed that the Interim Board had no input into the eight nominations that the panel will present on Saturday, except for establishing the parameters around which the members of the Independent Nominations Panel were appointed.

The tenure of the Interim Board will come to an end at the AGM.

“It’s been six months of intense work trying to unscramble many years of problems. Our report contains our learnings and recommendations for the future, and is a template for the next board, hopefully a springboard to more effective executive management. It’s a foundation for the future and that’s most important.

“Our mandate was not just about cricket, it was much bigger than that as Minister Mthethwa highlighted when he first met with us at the end of October. Sport cuts cross every facet of our lives and if cricket fails then it has a much wider impact than just for sport,” Nicolaou said.

Rihan Richards, the acting president of the Members Council that was mostly at loggerheads with the Interim Board and the Minister, thanked both Mthethwa and Nicolaou “for what you have done for cricket”.

“We are entering into a new era for cricket, this will change the face of cricket completely. This is just a report until it is implemented and now we have to take it forward. I don’t anticipate any problems with that at the AGM,” Richards said.

The death knell sounded for the existing Cricket South Africa Board on Sunday with the resignation of five non-independent directors and the move to appoint a Board with much better practitioners of corporate governance can now gain pace, according a Members Council insider.

The resignations of acting president Beresford Williams and fellow directors Angelo Carolissen (Boland), Donovan May (Eastern Province), John Mogodi (Limpopo) and Tebogo Siko (Northerns) has left the Board with just one non-independent director in Zola Thamae and three independents – Dr Eugenia Kula-Ameyaw, Marius Schoeman and Vuyokazi Memani-Sedile.

But they are expected to also stand down before Tuesday’s deadline set for CSA by sports minister Nathi Mthethwa, opening the way for an interim board to be appointed, which will complete the adjustments to the Memorandum of Incorporation that will change the composition of the Board. The major changes will see a majority of independent directors and non-independent directors will no longer also have a seat on the Members Council, as per the recommendations of the Nicholson Commission of Enquiry in 2012.

“Not all of the directors were happy to go, but they were basically told they had to, we forced them. We will now wait for the independents to resign, and if they don’t do that then we will deal with them quickly. An interim board will then be set up and we will take a suggestion as to how that should happen to the sports minister on Tuesday. And Sascoc will assist us with that.

“There may be one or two current members of the Members Council on that interim board, but we have decided that nobody who was in office in the four years between 2016 and December 2019 will be eligible,” the Members Council insider told The Citizen on Sunday.

It seems Anne Vilas of Central Gauteng cricket and KZN president Ben Dladla, two of the stars in the Members Council’s efforts to flex their muscle against the board, could be involved in that interim board because they have only recently been elected.

There are some doubts, however, that the interim board will be able to get the new MOI formalised before the AGM on December 5, leading to a possible delay in elections for the permanent new board.

It will be interesting to see how the new independent directors, who should make up the majority of the board, are elected because there have been some far-from-stellar appointments in the last few years. The independent directors that have been there have largely failed to intervene in the governance scandals that have plagued CSA and in some instances have actually made them worse.