The board has to rebuild integrity in an organisation that has become a standard-bearer for calamity.
Telford Vice | Cape Town
CSA took a step on its long walk to respectability late on Tuesday night when it announced that Lawson Naidoo had been elected to chair the board and that Steven Budlender would serve as the lead independent director.
Naidoo is the first independent director to hold the office, which has previously been filled by provincial administrators — who also sit on the members council. The incestuousness of the structure contributed to CSA’s umpteen governance failures.
That era ended on Tuesday, when a majority independent board was put in place. The process, bitterly and sometimes cynically opposed by the old order, started in November with the help of a government threat to withdraw funding and recognition of CSA’s teams as national representatives if the suits didn’t sort themselves out.
Currently the executive secretary of the Council for the Advancement of the South African Constitution, Naidoo is a founding partner of the Paternoster Group, a political risk consultancy. He has a masters in law from Cambridge University and comes with more than 30 years of experience in politics, business and civil society. Budlender is a respected senior counsel.
“We are all well aware of the challenges facing us in making CSA a world class sporting organisation both on and off the field of play,” a CSA release quoted Lawson as saying. South Africa’s men’s team brought their end of that bargain by completing a 2-0 Test series win in the Caribbean on Monday. The board faces the bigger task of rebuilding the integrity required to lure sponsors and public confidence back to an organisation that has become a standard-bearer for calamity in South African sports administration.
“The board agreed to focus their first 100 days in office on bringing stability to the organisation and embarking on an engagement programme to gain input from stakeholders as it seeks to align everyone towards a shared vision for the future,” the release said.
One hundred days from June 22 takes us to September 30, a Thursday. That date is now diarised. The world — or that part of it interested in South African cricket — is watching.
First published by Cricbuzz.
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