Johannesburg — The chairman of Cricket South Africa’s Board, Lawson Naidoo told the Parliamentary portfolio committee on sports, arts and recreation that a detailed plan to implement the recommendations of the Social Justice and Nation Building report will be presented next month.
Senior administrative officials from CSA appeared before the committee on Tuesday to outline how the organisation was dealing with various issues related to the SJN’s findings, including the legal proceedings related to Proteas coach Mark Boucher.
Cricket SA informed the committee, chaired by Beauty Dlulane that the Board of Directors had assigned various topics highlighted in the report to different sub-committees. The organisation’s cricket committee will deal with player remuneration and selection, the social and ethics committee with allegations of racism and racial slurs and the nominations committee with women’s cricket with an emphasis on creating a Women’s Committee.
Naidoo said a “consolidated view” from all the committees will be shared with the Board by the end of February. “We don’t want to pay lip service to this process, and we were careful not to provide a knee jerk response to the SJN report. We want to ensure we take a broader, considered and holistic view and how do we incorporate the lessons from that report into our five year strategy.”
Given all the publicity its received lately, the issues around Boucher, who is due to face a disciplinary process in May related to his part in singing a racist song targeting former teammate Paul Adams, were also scrutinised, with Democratic Alliance member Tsepo Mhlongo wanting to know why Boucher was not suspended.
“The Board took legal advice as to whether it was possible (to suspend Boucher),” said Naidoo. “We received legal opinion from two senior legal figures, experts in Labour law, who advised us there was no legal basis for CSA to effect precautionary suspension in respect of Boucher. The Board took a unanimous decision (not to suspend), because it would open us up to unnecessary litigation on the issue of suspension. The real issue is to deal with the allegations in the SJN report.”
Mhlongo was not satisfied with that response and demanded to see the legal opinion on which the Board’s decision was made.
Many of the questions asked to CSA didn’t paint the committee in a particularly good light. Some committee members didn’t know that the current Board isn’t the interim one, nor did they know when Boucher and Director of Cricket Graeme Smith were appointed and that it was done by the previous board, or about Thabang Moroe being dismissed or the SJN’s findings about match-fixing.
Time was spent scrutinising the Department of Sport’s role in development, which led to an admission by the Sports Minister, Nathi Mthethwa, that the relationship between his department and the department of education was not at a stage where it needed to be in terms of school sports. As part of the findings of the Eminent Persons Group - which provides data related to sports development and transformation, and to which sports federations are signed in order to measure transformation in the various codes - the two departments were supposed to have signed a Memorandum of Incorporation in 2018. “We are not happy with outcomes…this matter has been on our table for a very long time. Of late, we have decided to review the MOI (with the education department) , we have not reached a point that we want to,” said Mthethwa.
One of the SJN’s findings, which CSA’s acting CEO, Pholetsi Moseki repeated to the committee was that issues facing cricket “are a complex interaction of multiple factors stemming from the history of the country and consequent socio-economic factors that prevail today.”
As if to underline that point further, Mthethwa also admitted that his department could do little about the maintenance of facilities, because that is the responsibility of the Department of Local Government.
He made that admission in response to a question about why there weren’t more facilities in previously disadvantaged areas and in township schools where youngsters could take up cricket.
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