“Do whatever is necessary and appropriate in order to resolve or restore the integrity and reputation of CSA.” – sports minister Nathi Mthethwa gives the interim board the tallest order.
TELFORD VICE | Cape Town
A retired judge, a pharmaceutical executive, an election official, a governance expert and a forensic investigator walk into a cricket committee room and try to tell a googly from a thigh pad. This is not a joke. Instead it’s the make-up of the majority of CSA’s new interim board.
The other members are former ICC and CSA chief executive Haroon Lorgat, Omphile Ramela, who will relinquish his position as president of the South African Cricketers’ Association to avoid conflicts of interest, André Odendaal, a former chief executive of the Western Province Cricket Association, and Xolani Vonya, who resigned as president of Eastern Cricket Union at the weekend.
Zak Yaqoob, who was appointed to the Constitutional Court — the country’s highest court — by Nelson Mandela in 1998 and served until 2013, will chair the interim board. Andile Dawn Mbatha, an auditor who is the chief financial officer at the Independent Electoral Commission, and Nkeko Caroline Mampuru, the deputy head of the Special Investigating Unit, a government agency that specialises in anti-corruption, were also named. As was Stavros Nicolaou, a pharmaceutical expert and activist who is working with government to procure drugs and equipment in South Africa’s fight against Covid-19.
They were unveiled on Friday by South Africa’s minster of sport, Nathi Mthethwa, who made good on his promise to do so by the end of the week. Thus Mthethwa also followed through after saying he would intervene, which prompted the mass resignation of the former board on Sunday and Monday. Now for the hard part: cleaning up the administration of a sport that has fallen far from expected levels in a range of areas.
At a press conference in Pretoria that was relayed online, Mthethwa spoke of “public criticism on how cricket was conducting its affairs, particularly in the areas of leadership and governance, transformation, selection of teams, and so on, from various interest groups from within and outside cricket. CSA’s reputation continued to suffer with increasing calls for the board to step down. Instead of improving the situation was getting worse. It dawned on me that no matter how long we nudge cricket and delay the inevitable, we are going to be faced with that. Clearly there was no way that CSA was in a position to self-correct.”
The interim board has three months to put CSA on the straight and narrow, although its period in office could be extended “based on progress achieved”, Mthethwa said. CSA’s annual meeting, already postponed from September 5 to December 5, is in jeopardy: “In all practicalities, there’s no way that date for the AGM will remain.”
So far so reasonable. Because five members of the board do not come from organised cricket does not mean they don’t know the difference between a googly and a thigh pad, and a lot else about the game. Besides, this is not about cricket: it’s about fixing a system that has long been broken, often wilfully.
But doing so looms as a fight against a many-headed beast. A loud alarm should be raised by the fact that the new structure will report to CSA’s highest authority, the members council — which includes half of the 10 board members who resigned in disgrace just days ago. How does that not amount to the suspects in a trial also sitting on the jury?
Mthethwa said the interim board would “expeditiously deal with current governance systems, structures and procedures; including a proper consideration with the aim of implementation of the Nicholson report”. It would also “consider the Fundudzi report, its implications and consequences for CSA, … take any action recommended in the report, or actions that the interim board deems appropriate”. And “review all board decisions taken since 2019, … report on those decisions that require the attention of the members council, and to generally do whatever is necessary and appropriate in order to resolve or restore the integrity and reputation of CSA”.
The Nicholson report was the result of an investigation by a retired High Court judge, Christopher Nicholson, in the wake of the discovery that bonuses paid to CSA in appreciation of South Africa’s successful staging of the 2009 IPL were not properly declared to CSA’s governance committees. Nicholson found serious flaws in CSA’s oversight systems and recommended in his report in 2012 that the board be trimmed to nine elected members and be restructured to comprise a “majority of independent, professionally skilled, non-executive directors” and be chaired by an independent. That never happened, partly because the South African Sports Confederation and Olympic Committee — itself a model of maladministration — objected to all that independence. So CSA’s non-independents were able to keep control by reserving seven places on the 12-member board for themselves, one of whom would be the president.
The Fundudzi report encompasses all the calamities that befell cricket from 2016 to 2019. Several senior CSA staff were suspended last year, including Thabang Moroe, who was dismissed as chief executive in August after being found guilty of serious misconduct. So Lorgat’s inclusion on the interim board will not pass unnoticed. His departure as CSA’s chief executive in September 2017 was engineered by the faction that installed Moroe, and Fundudzi’s investigation would have covered most of the last two years of Lorgat’s tenure, which started in 2013.
Lorgat is a highly competent and experienced administrator who left CSA in a far better state financially than it is now, and there is little doubt his skills will prove valuable in his new role. But could his neutrality be questioned? The answer, perhaps, is that he is likely not implicated in the Fundudzi report. Cricbuzz understands he was never contacted by the investigators, and presumably if his name did come up in the report Mthethwa would not have agreed to his inclusion on the board.
Mthethwa would have had to make that decision because he is among the few people who have had the opportunity to see the complete Fundudzi report, which CSA has tried its best to keep under lock and key. Maybe not for much longer. “This thing where you have a report which is a secret document must come to an end,” Mthethwa said. “It must be understood, scrutinised. Implement the recommendations but be at liberty to look at the report itself critically, so that nothing is an area you can’t get into. If we are to turn around cricket we have to do things not conveniently. We have to have commitment and devotion to change the situation. If that means some toes will be trampled upon, so be it.”
Some of those toes could belong to Rihan Richards, who since Monday has been interim president of the members council. Certainly, on Friday he sounded like a man trying to stave off pain: “Eighty or 90% of those [Nicholson] recommendations have been implemented. The minister has specifically related the question around how the governance structures should work. Those matters have been taken aboard. The minister is aware of how we intend addressing this. This process has started long before the interim board was established. We have a very clear road map of how to it. The interim board will have an opportunity to review it. The should be no real or perceived conflict. Everybody can only serve on one body. You cannot sit on the board, the members council, and then still on the [provincial] affiliate. That proposal came from within our ranks and was agreed upon by all parties.”
Sounds good. Except that Richards was first elected to CSA’s board in 2013, and is still entrenched in the game as president of Northern Cape Cricket. He and his peers have had seven years to implement the most important of Nicholson’s recommendations, and haven’t done so.
Richards had the look of a desperate man as he buttonholed Mthethwa on their way off the podium, and whispered to him: “We must stay in contact as well. I have also extended a hand to the portfolio madam.” That would be Beauty Dlulani, the chair of parliament’s sports portfolio committee, on whose carpet CSA finds itself all too frequently.
Maybe the politics of the moment was beyond Richards. Mthethwa is serving his second term in the toy department of government after being demoted in 2014, a year he began as the much more important minister of police, which he came to after serving as minister of safety and security — also superior to the arts and culture job he took six years ago, and the sport component he inherited last year. He would seem intent on being conspicuous enough to merit a promotion at cabinet reshuffles to come.
South Africans have been down this road before. In January 2013, one of Mthethwa’s predecessors as sports minister, Fikile Mbalula, in announcing what became the Nicholson commission, said: “Whatever the retired judge recommends, I will implement.” He didn’t, of course. But Mbalula made enough noise in his time in sport to become minister of police. Even so, Mthethwa had better tread carefully on those targetable toes — Mbalula has since sunk to the level of transport minister.
An ambitious politician walks into a cricket club’s grubby dressingroom. Unimpressed, they look around nervously, and wonder what’s the quickest way out of there. They find a broken window, a flickering light bulb, a dripping showerhead, and ripped carpets. So they call a few repair people, and climb onto the roof to proclaim, loudly, what an effective politician they are. Relax. It’s a joke.
First published by Cricbuzz.
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