“I look at CSA in a very similar way that I would at state institutions that have been decimated in recent times.” – Lawson Naidoo, CSA board chair
Telford Vice | Cape Town
LAWSON Naidoo fell truly, madly, deeply in love on the morning of Thursday, February 5, 1970. He was weeks away from his seventh birthday. Fifty-one years on, his passion is undimmed. And thereby hangs a cricket story.
“I was at the 1969/70 Test match against Australia at Kingsmead, when Barry Richards made 94 not out before lunch,” Naidoo told Cricbuzz. “My love of the game goes back to then, and I’ve been a keen follower for all those years.” He relocated to Cape Town in 1994, and says he has missed only one of the 33 Newlands Tests South Africa have played since: against Pakistan in February 2013, when he was on holiday in India.
Naidoo has written on the game for various publications, including the now defunct Wisden Cricketer, and captains the Spin Doctors XI of Cape Town’s Friendly Cricketers’ Association, an honour he has held since the club’s founding in 1998. He self-identifies as “nowadays a lower middle order journeyman”, and describes himself as “a keen observer of the game from a playing perspective as well as its administration and governance”.
About that last bit, as of Tuesday Naidoo has been the chairperson of CSA’s board. And the first independent director in a role that, previously, was reserved for whoever was also the president — who was, and still is, drawn from the ranks of the 14 provincial affiliates and associates. The glaring lack of oversight in that structure led cricket down many a dark governance path.
So Naidoo’s election, enabled by a new memorandum of incorporation (MOI), which stipulates a majority independent board chaired by an independent, is the most heartening sign yet that CSA is sincere about cleaning up its act. Because Naidoo is more than a cricket romantic. He’s a public intellectual who, armed with a masters in law from Cambridge, among many other qualifications, has built a strong record over the past 35 years for not hesitating to tell right from wrong. These days he does so as the executive secretary of the Council for the Advancement of the South African Constitution (CAFAC), a progressive organisation, and is also a founding partner of the Paternoster Group, a political risk consultancy.
A focus of Naidoo’s work has been the interrogation of an establishment he helped create. He was among the political activists who went into exile during apartheid, and from 1987 to 1992 he worked for the African National Congress’ (ANC) mission in London. From 1994 to 1999, during Nelson Mandela’s presidential term, he served as a special advisor to Frene Ginwala, the speaker of South Africa’s first duly elected parliament.
The ANC was an exemplary liberation movement, and for 15 years after the country embarked on the road towards democracy in 1994 — when South Africans of all races, not only whites, voted in a general election for the first time — the party tried to meet the challenges of fairly governing an entire nation. But, with major systems and infrastructure designed to cater mainly for the tiny white minority, that proved all but impossible.
So hopes for “a better life for all” — an ANC slogan — were dashed, not least because of the intractable conflict between the expectations of a newly empowered electorate and a disproportionately white affluent class alarmed by the prospect of the revocation of its unearned privilege. But, in a country where opposition parties range from relics of apartheid to buffoons in berets, the ANC remains the only viable option at the polls even though all classes are dissatisfied with its performance.
The inevitable erosion in the integrity of South Africa’s experiment in democracy, and in the belief that it would succeed, made the ANC ripe for infection by abuse. In May 2009 Jacob Zuma was inaugurated, triggering almost nine years of rampant maladministration during which it was made increasingly clear that the presidency was little more than a front for a slew of corrupt figures. In October last year, Cyril Ramaphosa — also of the ANC — who became president after his predecessor was forced to resign under ever darker clouds, said more than USD34-billion had been stolen from state coffers during the Zuma years.
All of which is relevant, even in a cricket story. Naidoo has written widely on state corruption in South Africa and given evidence as an expert to an ongoing judicial commission launched in order to, government said, “investigate allegations of state capture, corruption, fraud and other allegations in the public sector including organs of state”. If you’ve kept up with developments at CSA since around 2009, that will sound familiar.
“I look at CSA in a very similar way that I would at state institutions that have been decimated in recent times,” Naidoo said. “I think the challenge of fixing CSA is not different from the governance challenges that the country faces in other respects. I see a direct correlation between what I do in my day job and what my role will be at CSA.”
To that end, Naidoo has put his trust in CSA’s new MOI: “Given my background at CAFAC, constitutions are very important. I see the MOI as the constitution for CSA, and we’ve got to live by that. Not just the platitudes about it but demonstrate it in how we operate — with openness and transparency.
“I think there’s been far too much secrecy about what happens, which is unnecessary in my view. We need much more open and transparent, and open to criticism. Because we will make mistakes. We mustn’t try and hide them from the public. If we make mistakes we must take responsibility and account for them. The biggest challenge is to restore public confidence in the administration of the game, and that includes players, fans, media, sponsors, and — very importantly — the ICC.”
The task of setting matters straight with the latter has fallen to Naidoo: on Thursday CSA said the board had decided he would represent the organisation at ICC meetings. In the past that was done by CSA’s president, a provincial leader and thus part of the old problems.
Naidoo will go into those meetings backed by the fact that South Africa is a full member of the ICC, and thus has to be taken seriously. The sponsors who have deserted CSA in recent years owe him no such respect. What might he say to them?
“You’ve been asking for an independent board, you’ve been asking for CSA to clean up its governance structures. I believe this MOI does that. We now have a properly constituted board in place with credible people on that board. You can now trust us with your money again.”
Unlike some of the suits who came before him, and spent thousands in company money on alcohol, Naidoo understands that “without money we’re not able to do what we need to do, which is to grow the game and broaden its appeal among all South Africans”.
And to keep the eyes of those who have made cricket their profession firmly on the ball: “One of our roles is to get cricket off the front pages and onto the back pages. If we fix the administration that will hopefully lead to success on the field, because the players have been distracted by what’s going on. Rightly so, because their livelihoods have been at stake. And not just at international level but at provincial and franchise level.
“We need to take away that concern for them and allow them to do what they’re best at, which is playing the game. Hopefully, by fixing this, we’ll allow the Proteas to resume their position as one of the top cricket teams in the world.”
If that makes Naidoo sound as if this isn’t his first cricket administration rodeo, maybe that’s because it isn’t. In 1991, when apartheid was still the law of the land but the wave of change was rising, Steve Tshwete — an ANC stalwart who would become sports minister — and Ali Bacher, by then the managing director of CSA’s forerunner, went to London to lobby the high commissions of West Indian countries to support South Africa’s readmission to the international game after 21 years of isolation. Naidoo arranged those meetings and accompanied Tshwete and Bacher to them.
That someone so deeply involved in the struggle should credit a man as polarising as Barry Richards with helping to spark his love for the game will make Naidoo difficult to put into one of the boxes South Africans reserve for each other — which will be a key advantage in an often cynically competitive arena where identity can matter more than anything else.
Richards, playing only his second Test, went on to make 140 in that innings, and Graeme Pollock 274: South Africa’s highest Test score for more than 29 years, and a display of batting so arresting it is still spoken of in close to religious tones. The South Africans won the match, the second of the series, by an innings and claimed the other three, two by more than 300 runs. And then they disappeared from view as isolation took hold.
One version of this narrative holds that team up as heroes who were unfairly denied their glory; that they were the best team in world cricket. Closer to the truth is that the Australians were reluctant tourists who arrived exhausted after a long tour of India, and wouldn’t have come at all had England’s 1968/69 visit not been cancelled by the South African government because the English had had the audacity to include Basil D’Oliveira in their squad. How dare they! Everyone knew South Africa didn’t sully themselves playing against opposition that wasn’t entirely white.
Others see that South Africa team as the apex of white supremacy, oblivious to the cruel joke that, had they been born any other race, their talent would have gone as undiscovered as that that lay dormant in their gardeners and maids.
Naidoo will know all that, and a lot more. For instance, the stands at Kingsmead on Thursday, February 5, 1970 would have been racially segregated. He was considered, by law, born not good enough to watch cricket among whites. And yet he still fell in love. A “lower middle order journeyman”? Yeah, right.
First published by Cricbuzz.
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