Anne Vilas – Bulletproof Truth

One more tantrum, without feeling, by relics of CSA’s gladly gone age

“We can’t go back to what we had. It doesn’t treat the game well.” – Dean Elgar on the suits’ old order.

Telford Vice | Cape Town

CSA’s members council, which has proved itself a perennial impediment to the sound running of the game in South Africa, has been swept aside. True to its troubled history, it first tried to go out with a recalcitrant bang. In the end, all it could manage was a whimper of acquiescence.

Rihan Richards and Donovan May, relics of the council that caused a lot of the trouble, have hung on as CSA’s president and vice-president. But those titles are likely worth little more, in power terms, than the letterheads printed with their holders’ names — except as reminders of the suits’ inglorious past. Pertinently, their new roles do not put them on the board.

Across the equator and far away in St Lucia, Dean Elgar approved. “I hope there’s going to be a new dawn and a new era,” he told an online press conference on Thursday. “We can’t go back to what we had. It doesn’t treat the game well.

“When you are instated as a captain, whether you like it or not you’re always going to be involved with those kind of chats on the boardroom front. I’m not a boardroom specialist. I’m not a politician. I’m a cricket player and the Proteas captain, and that’s all I care about. “I’d like to say that I trust the new structure going forward. Cricket needs to be put first again. It was taking very much of a bad back seat in the past. Hopefully the new structure and the new board can get cricket back up and running where it should be.”

The board will in future be headed by its chair, who has yet to be named and cannot be Richards or May or any of the non-independent members. That’s part of the seismic shift that has changed the shape of high level cricket administration in South Africa.

The members council, which is comprised of the presidents of the 14 provinces and associates, agreed in August 2012 that CSA should be served by a majority independent board. It took until CSA’s annual meeting on Saturday — its first in 20 months — for the council to fulfil that commitment. Little wonder: previously, most of the seats on the board were reserved for council members.

Consequently cricket has suffered years of financial failings and governance scandals, which in November sparked government intervention that threatened the suspension of the country’s teams from international competition and the withdrawal of state funding unless CSA’s house was put in order. That prompted the resignation of the dysfunctional elected board, and the establishment of an interim structure. The interim board dragged the council, kicking and screaming all the way, and with sports minister Nathi Mthethwa looking on sternly, to Saturday’s meeting.

But the council had one last tantrum to throw. Despite having no authority to do so, it objected to the appointment of Norman Arendse — a former CSA president and lead independent director — as one of the eight independent directors. Asked during an online news conference on Saturday to provide reasons for that position, Richards at first refused. When pressed he said: “We must consider that advocate Arendse was the lead independent director during the period of the appointment of Thabang Moroe [as CSA’s chief executive in September 2017], as well the [stillborn Global League T20], and a number of other issues — specifically utterances with regard to CSA during the period he’s been off the board.”

The council’s bleating about “utterances” is easily batted away by the fact that Arendse — a fiery senior counsel — has criticised CSA’s catastrophes as an organisation. He has not taken aim, publicly, at individuals. Did Richards forget that he was also on the board that green-lit the GLT20 and appointed Moroe? Those decisions are connected in that Moroe’s predecessor, Haroon Lorgat, was hanged with what the board said were questionable practices in the way he was trying to organise the league. Once Lorgat was out of the way, Moroe — until then a council member himself and vice-president of the board — was installed as chief executive.

Somehow neither the members council nor the board heard the governance alarms that would have been rung by Moroe making that leap, which was instrumental in CSA crashing to its deepest crises. The chickens came home to roost in August last year, when Moroe was sacked for serious mismanagement. But the council was quick to protest, unsuccessfully, when Lorgat was named to the interim board.

Another example of the council’s fractured thinking was had on Saturday when it raised concerns that only one woman would be on the board: Muditambi Ravele, an experienced administrator who will serve as an independent member. But that followed the council having to choose between Simphiwe Ndzundzu, a man, and Anne Vilas, a woman, to fill one of the five seats it had been granted on the board — and opting for Ndzundzu.

Muhammad Seedat, the chair of the nominations committee given the authority to appoint the independent directors, paid the council the respect of considering their objection. But when the annual meeting resumed on Wednesday, Arendse was confirmed as an independent. Among the others is Andrew Hudson, the former Test opener and erstwhile convenor of the national selection panel.

Quite what the council hoped to achieve by delaying cricket’s progress from Saturday to Wednesday is a mystery. Maybe when much of what you’ve been doing for years has amounted to getting in the way of the game going forward, another few days doesn’t matter.

First published by Cricbuzz.

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All the presidents’ people

A roll call of the more or less reprehensible in South African cricket, recording their names and the context of their involvement.

TELFORD VICE | Cape Town

DESPITE mounting pressure from every stakeholder in South African cricket, along with the threat of either state control or international suspension — or both — two votes went against appointing the interim board at CSA’s members council meeting on Monday.

The council is the game’s highest authority in the country, and thus central to the shambles cricket has been steered into during the last three years. So it was surprising that it initially rejected, in a letter to sports minister Nathi Mthethwa last Wednesday, the get-out-of-jail card represented by Mthethwa’s proposed interim board. Only following four meetings after that was the light seen, and even then not unanimously. That does not bode well for the hope that the board and the council find ways to work together, which both have expressed.

Council members received a summary of Monday’s vote, not a breakdown. Cricbuzz has been told who the dissenters might be, and has asked them to confirm. Neither has responded. Even so, we know who sits on the members council, and how long they have been there — crucial facts in the effort to root out the rot.

The structure normally comprises representatives of CSA’s 12 provincial affiliates, its two associates, and CSA’s president and vice-president. Of the current members, five were part of the council on September 28, 2017: Rudy Claassen, Craig Nel, Donovan May, Rihan Richards and Angelo Carolissen. A sixth who was around then, Oupa Nkagisang, hasn’t been part of council business since December 2018, when CSA took control of the affiliate he leads on claims of maladministration.

The 2017 date is important because it was when Thabang Moroe made the unlikely leap from serving as Gauteng’s president and CSA’s vice-president to CSA’s acting chief executive, a vacancy created by Haroon Lorgat’s engineered ousting. Also crucial is that it was the board, not the council, that installed Moroe despite the fact that — CSA told parliament in October — he was not qualified for the position.

The board responsible for appointing Moroe comprised Chris Nenzani, Beresford Williams, Richards, Zola Thamae, Tando Ganda, Faeez Jaffar, Norman Arendse, Mohammed Iqbal Khan, Dawn Mokhobo, Vusi Pikoli and Louis von Zeuner, although Arendse missed key meetings because of ill health. Along with Moroe, Nenzani, Williams, Thamae, Ganda and Richards also sat on the council at that stage. Richards is the only survivor who was part of both of those bodies. He is now the acting president of the council.

When Lorgat left CSA, it had a bank balance of the equivalent of USD73.7-million and did not want for sponsors. Moroe was appointed to the job proper by the board on July 17, 2018. When he was suspended on charges of serious misconduct in December, having given himself sweeping powers, it was projected that CSA would be USD68.4-million in debt by the end of the 2022 rights cycle. Sponsors had either announced their impending departure or were scaling back their commitment.

Tebogo Siko, Anne Vilas, Ben Dladla, Xolani Vonya, Xander Snyders, Ashraf Burns, Dawid Roodt and Simphiwe Ndzundzu became part of the council after Moroe was appointed in a permanent capacity, and thus cannot be blamed for abiding by the board’s decision. Vilas, Burns and Roodt came onto the council between May and August this year — after Moroe was suspended — so are unsullied by this saga.

The same cannot be said for Claassen, Nel, May, Richards, Siko and Carolissen. May and Siko joined the board last year, in February and September, and Carolissen in September 2018, so they are even more culpable. They didn’t help appoint Moroe, but they also didn’t stop him damaging the game.

After months of unheeded calls for the board to go, Nenzani resigned as CSA’s president on August 17. He was followed by the remaining members on October 25 and 26: Williams, Carolissen, May, Siko, Thamae, John Mogodi, Dheven Dharmalingham, Marius Schoeman, Eugenia Kula-Ameyaw and Vuyokazi Memani-Sedile. But Carolissen, May and Siko are still with us as affiliate presidents and thus council members.

The point of this roll call of the more or less reprehensible is to record the names of those involved in South African cricket’s ongoing ugliness and to sketch the context of their involvement. It isn’t intended to make for sparkling reading.

The names of 31 administrators are recorded above. That only three of them — Vilas, Burns and Roodt — can be given a clean audit is an indictment on the state of the game in this country. And even that is conditional: we don’t know whether any or two of them voted against the sanity of allowing the interim board to be appointed.

As for the other, blemished 28, we know what you did last summer. And the summer before that. And the one before that. And before that. And in the winters, too …

First published by Cricbuzz.

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CSA, SASCOC stalemate on forensic report

“We are in engagement with SASCOC, we’ve been engaged with SASCOC and we continue to engage with SASCOC.” – Beresford Williams fails to confirm whether CSA will give SASCOC what they want.

TELFORD VICE | Cape Town

THE South African Sports Confederation and Olympic Committee (SASCOC) have demanded free access to the full report of a forensic investigation into CSA’s affairs that could snare powerful figures in the game in wrongdoing. Until they see the report on their own terms, SASCOC say, they won’t name the task team that will temporarily sideline CSA’s board in a bid to get to the bottom of multiple crises. CSA are refusing to bend the knee to SASCOC, citing legal implications, thereby creating a stalemate. Now what?

Not for the first time, South African cricket’s journey towards honest, competent, responsible, transparent administration is stuck in the starting blocks. That CSA should be held to account by SASCOC, which has a record of mowing down sound governance practices like a shot-putter trying to run the hurdles, should come as a shock to the system. And all the while the cricket world is either crying about or laughing at the state of the game in South Africa.

“There can be no doubt that the public, current and ex-players, sponsors and stakeholders have lost all trust and confidence in the CSA board,” Aleck Skhosana, SASCOC’s acting president, told an online press conference on Thursday. “This is evidenced on a daily basis when calls are made for the CSA board to step down or step aside. SASCOC has a duty to listen to these calls, and to investigate the alleged issues and problems for themselves.”

SASCOC made a move in that direction last week, when it told CSA to withdraw its board and key staff to allow a task team — appointed by the Olympic body — to probe cricket’s problems: a development that could provoke the ICC to suspend CSA because it could be construed as interference.

That followed two meetings between SASCOC and CSA. “The second one was cut short when CSA refused to make available to SASCOC the much talked about forensic report,” Skhosana said. “It was impossible for us to continue in a meeting when we don’t have the report so that we may be able to read from the same slate and sing from the same hymn book.”

CSA has offered SASCOC’s board the report, but on condition that board members sign a non-disclosure agreement beforehand. SASCOC isn’t happy about that, as Skhosana explained: “No reasonable person can effectively enquire into the affairs of CSA without having full access to the report, and without the assistance of legal and or forensic experts. None of us have investigative and forensic expertise and legal expertise. These things must be done by outside people.”

CSA’s highest authority, the members council, which is comprised of the presidents of the 14 provincial affiliates, examined the report at the weekend. But only after they signed NDAs. Skhosana found that logic faulty: “We cannot be certain that there would have been proper consultation with the members of the respective unions. How are they expected to obtain a proper mandate from their boards when they are not permitted to share the contents of a report, which they commissioned, with their boards? That is why the refusal to make the report available on an unrestricted basis is both irrational and unreasonable.”

Skhosana said the members council would be represented on the task team, whose recommendations CSA would be expected to implement: “Should they fail to do so, then SASCOC will have no alternative to take appropriate measures to ensure compliance.”

SASCOC has the power to put federations under administration, but Skhosana said that was not the intention in this case: “We are not interested in running the administration of cricket. We don’t know anything about cricket. It must be run by the people who understand cricket, who have got passion and bona fides in terms of cricket administration.”

But he made it clear CSA shouldn’t push its luck: “We have given the CSA members council an undertaking that the report, once received, will only be discussed between the board and its advisory team and will not be published as SASCOC respects the rights of everyone implicated in the report. Should the report still not be forthcoming, then unfortunately SASCOC will have no alternative but to resort to other measures that I’m not going to deal with here.”

Asked if CSA would comply with SASCOC’s dictates, acting president Beresford Williams said: “We are in engagement with SASCOC, we’ve been engaged with SASCOC and we continue to engage with SASCOC. CSA had responded in detail to SASCOC around our position. I also want to state clearly that we have a fiduciary duty to cricket as board members.

“What has been resolved unanimously by the members council … is that the forensic report they received will also be made available to SASCOC under the same conditions. Having said that, at this point we continue to stay committed to the dialogue and engagement. We even offered and committed to make the summary report available. We would provide the necessary breakdown by our legal representatives. That opportunity would be presented to SASCOC’s board. That opportunity has been presented and we await their formal feedback.”

Williams was asked similar questions twice more, and twice more he offered versions of the inconclusive, non-committal statement above. How CSA handles of the report is probably their only hope of retaining a shred of credibility in the wake a damning period of crisis and mismanagement. Why not publish it as widely as possible?

“On the advice of our legal representatives, we have been cautioned against releasing the report now,” Williams said. “The board and the members council unanimously agreed that there is a huge risk of comprising future litigation. We are in legal process at the moment, and if there’s any liability we as a board and as an organisation cannot shift the blame. We need look at what that liability is, and what are the consequences for the organisation and cricket in general.”

Anne Vilas, the president of the Central Gauteng Lions, has previously criticised the decision not to release the report to the members council. She was part of the weekend meeting, and on Thursday she said: “I think we all have a better understanding of CSA’s position that it’s not in our interest to disclose the full gamut of the report. There are further investigations that need to be taken. We’re mindful of the rights of all the people mentioned in the report. We need to be cognisant that we can’t step on their rights. But further action will be taken if warranted.”

Oddly, given what he had said earlier, Skhosana had understanding for CSA’s stance on the issue: “We know that there are quite a number of legal issues that are contained in that report. There are contestations that will drag for a number of years, and it needs to be handled in the manner that you are suggesting. I’m sure we would also handle this in the manner that you are doing if it was a SASCOC report. Legal issues can cost a lot of money; they can collapse that organisation.”

Skhosana had left the conference by the time it was made clear that the members council was pushing back against SASCOC’s intervention by resolving that CSA’s board and executive staff should remain in their positions, and that SASCOC should foot the bill for the task team.

Now what? Either SASCOC or CSA back down. Or this ends up in the courts. Who wins? Not cricket.

First published by Cricbuzz.

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