Nicholson commission – Bulletproof Truth

CSA turkeys refuse to vote for Christmas

“The interim board is disappointed that at this critical juncture for South African cricket, the members council has chosen to preserve the untenable status quo.” – CSA

Telford Vice | Cape Town

NOT for the first time, the majority of CSA’s members council has proved itself to be South African cricket’s worst enemy. And re-opened the door to intervention by a government that hitherto has been patient enough to grant the council opportunities to mend its errant ways.

But push may come to shove in the wake of a meeting on Saturday, when the members council rejected a proposal to bring CSA’s governance structures in line with modern standards. That could prompt sports minister Nathi Mthethwa to cut CSA’s funding and withdraw recognition of its teams as national representatives.

This is nothing new for South Africa’s long-suffering cricket aficionados. It’s been nine years since retired judge Chris Nicholson, in his report following his investigation into USD573,000 losing its way through CSA’s governance committees, recommended that the board be restructured to include a majority of independent directors and be chaired by an independent. CSA has since found ways to weasel out of implementing that plan — not least because the majority of board members must, as per CSA’s current memorandum of incorporation (MOI), be drawn from the ranks of the members council, which as CSA’s highest authority is superior even to the board. The council is comprised of the leaders of CSA’s 14 provincial affiliates and associates. They are elected officials who too often do not have the skills or experience required to run an enterprise as dynamic and high-profile as a national board. Yet the buck stops with them. Little wonder CSA has lurched from one administrative, financial or governance crisis to the next for years on end. It is a chronically dysfunctional organisation.

The members council had the chance to do their duty to change that narrative when they were asked to agree to change the MOI to make the board CSA’s ultimate authority, to accept a board comprised of seven independent and four non-independent — or council members — as directors, and to agree that the board should be chaired by an independent director. They refused on Tuesday and again on Saturday. A reason the council has trotted out for its recalcitrance is that the new structure would mean the game is not run by enough cricket people — this even as damning evidence mounts that cricket people in high positions have been good for little else but running the game into the ground. CSA is millions of rand in debt, is wading through disciplinary procedures against suspended senior executives, is shedding jobs, and is struggling to secure sponsors. The game is in danger of toppling over its own inept leadership.

But the members council clings on. It can do so because the same faulty MOI that allows it to sit on the board and the council simultaneously also puts it in control of CSA. Nobody is watching the detectives. Since November, CSA has had an interim board that was assembled with Mthethwa’s help and given a mandate to clean up the game. That required the resignation of the elected board, which refused to jump without a push. The push duly came, and the board went. But there has been no getting rid of largely the same people from the members council. So, essentially, nothing has changed.

It fell to the interim board to try to persuade the turkeys of the members council to vote for the Christmas that would mean the diminishing of their authority. Those attempts foundered on Saturday, when eight of the 14 members voted against adopting the recommendations. A release issued by CSA’s corporate communications office was vinegary with disapproval: “This [a majority of independent directors] is a well-established governance principle, both in South Africa and internationally. It was also supported by advice given to the interim board and members council by renowned company law and governance expert Michael Katz …

“In the interests of transparency and in the public interest we will be requesting the members council to disclose which members voted for and against the well-established principle of a majority of independent directors. This is integral to good governance and to the restoration of the reputation of cricket in South Africa and internationally, and in order to address historic governance failures which have plagued cricket in South Africa.”

Almost five hours after that landed, CSA issued a release on behalf of the members council: “The majority of the affiliates rejected the proposals that were advanced by the interim board, specifically on areas that were non-negotiables. The affiliates felt that the Interim board was imposing certain decisions on the members council without room for further exploration.” Unhelpfully, the council did not specify the “non-negotiables” it raised.

Cricbuzz has learnt that Gauteng, North West, South Western Districts, Western Province and Easterns were in favour of the new deal and that Northern Cape — headed by Rihan Richards, the acting president of the members council — favoured an equal split of independent and non-independent directors. That leaves Boland, Northerns, Free State, Border, Eastern Province, KwaZulu-Natal, Limpopo and Mpumalanga: the execrable eight.

The other side of the equation is that good independent directors are hard to find in South Africa, which CSA has discovered for itself in the past year. Thabang Moroe’s appointment as chief executive was championed by the independent board members, as was Kugandrie Govender’s to the same position in an acting capacity. Moroe has since been fired and Govender suspended. It was an independent board member’s decision not to release to the public a forensic report into CSA’s ills. More independents don’t guarantee better administration, but poor administration is assured if not enough of them are involved in decision-making.

“The interim board is disappointed that at this critical juncture for South African cricket, the members council has chosen to preserve the untenable status quo,” CSA’s first release said. “Cricket in South Africa is a national good and in doing so, the members council has not only disappointed the interim board, the South African cricketing community but also the South African people at large.”

Unsurprisingly, the council didn’t see matters that way: “The assertion that the members council has disappointed the cricket community is unfair and unfortunate. The members council had consulted with its affiliates and obtained a mandate, which was duly communicated to the interim board. The members council cannot deviate from the mandate of the constituency it serves. That would be irresponsible and dereliction of its responsibilities.”

The members council has been failing, maybe wilfully, for years. The interim board has, not for want of intent and effort, also failed. Over to you, Mr Mthethwa.

First published by Cricbuzz.

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Glass half-full for Australia tour. For now …

“The virus is so changing that we cannot predict what will happen. If things suddenly take a turn for the worse and the experts say we can’t do it, we won’t be able to.” – Zak Yacoob, CSA’s interim board chair, on the chances of Australia’s tour going ahead.

Telford Vice | Cape Town

WEAR a mask. Maintain social distancing. Don’t drive drunk. South Africans have heard it all before. But not from a cricket administrator telling them how to do their bit to keep Australia’s tour on track despite the coronavirus pandemic.

England abandoned their white-ball tour in December with half their six matches unplayed because of positive tests within the squads’ bio-secure environment. But no cases of the virus were detected in the bubble before and during Sri Lanka’s two Tests in the country in December and January. Where did that leave the visit by the Australians, who are due to play three Tests in South Africa in April?

“I had a chat with the chair of CA [Earl Eddings] about a week ago, and we agreed that the tour is going to go ahead,” Zak Yacoob, who chairs CSA’s interim board, told an online press conference on Thursday. “We agreed that we are going to try and ensure that we are going to make sure our facilities are as good possible; as good as necessary. We agreed that we learn every day, but that is not on the basis that we did anything wrong when England was here, of course. Because you know that none of the England people were affected. That’s the bottom line.”

Two positive tests in the England camp were subsequently declared false. A common South African view of why that tour failed revolves around England listing as a condition of their agreement to play the series in South Africa that they be allowed to leave the squads’ shared hotel to play golf. CSA acquiesced, and the visitors embraced that privilege enthusiastically by taking to five different golf courses spread between 13 and 72 kilometres from their hotel on eight of the 24 days they were in the country. It seems the lesson landed firmly with CSA — all involved were confined to the hotel for the Sri Lanka series — and will influence arrangements for Australia’s tour.

“The learning in relation to this virus changes all the time, and as it changes things must change,” Yacoob said. “We agreed that as professionals neither [Eddings] nor I know anything about this. So we rely on professionals. We have doctors, virology experts, isolation experts, and so on, who lead us through this process. We have adopted the approach that as long as the experts on both sides, true professionals in relation to corona and health, agree that the facilities are fine, we go ahead on the basis that the facilities are fine. So far there is, between the chair of CA and myself, no doubt that the [tour] will go ahead.”

Pholetsi Moseki, CSA’s acting chief executive, was confident the venture would get the green light: “The details will be finalised and announced to the media in a week or so.”

But Yacoob’s assurance was necessarily conditional: “We have agreed, also, that the coronavirus is so changing that we cannot predict what will happen. So if things suddenly take a turn for the worse and the experts say we can’t do it, we won’t be able to. We have to pray that things don’t get so bad.”

Which is where cricketminded South Africans come in: “The cricket supporters in our country must know that when they’re complying with distance and masking and so on, they’re doing it not only in their own interests. They’re doing it in the interests of cricket. And if they don’t mask, don’t keep distance, and they don’t stop driving drunk, and all that sort of thing, each of them by their contribution to expanding the virus will be making some contribution to the stopping of cricket and a whole range of other things.”

Keeping international cricket going in the time of Covid-19 wasn’t CSA’s only ongoing challenge. “The most important thing for the interim board now is to go into the brass tacks of how to change the structure of CSA in order to ensure that it works better,” Yacoob said. The members council — comprised of provincial affiliate presidents — and not the board is CSA’s highest authority. To muddy the waters of authority still more, most of the seats on the board are reserved for members council suits.

“You cannot have two centres of power in one organisation,” Yacoob said. “Our preference at the moment is for the board to be the centre of power in relation to day-to-day operational matters. We should make absolutely certain that the majority of the members of the future board are independent.”

That would bring CSA into line with the recommendations of the Nicholson report, which the organisation has avoided implementing fully since 2012. But there was a catch, as Yacoob explained: “According to [CSA’s] memorandum of incorporation [MOI] as it currently is, only the members council can change [the MOI]. If the members council refuses to agree to the change there may be some trouble and things could take a longer time.”

The members council presided over the financial corruption in CSA’s professional arm in 2009 that led to the Nicholson investigation. The buck for the financial and governance calamities that have engulfed CSA since 2017 also stops with the members council. Even so, Yacoob expected it to do the right thing this time: “I have no doubt that the members council is not going to come to the negotiations with any ulterior purpose. I think they will come in genuinely and we will have a bona fide debate. But the complication is that an independent board does in a sense result in a reduction of the powers of the members council in some ways.”

The interim board was established in November with the help of Nathi Mthethwa, South Africa’s sports minister. Its term was to have expired on January 15 but has been extended by a month. Yacoob said the board might seek more time to complete its work. But, just as it was up to the members council to appoint the interim board — which it refused to do initially — so it will be the members council’s decision whether the structure survives beyond February 15. “If the members council does not approve the extension, unless something happens or the minister does something, or unless there is some agreement, out we go,” Yacoob said. “So we really are at the mercy of the members council and we don’t know what they are going to decide.”

As if that wasn’t enough to keep the interim board busy, it is being taken to court by Omphile Ramela for removing him from as a member. Xolani Vonya, who had been recused from the board, has been accepted back into the fold. Kugandrie Govender, CSA’s former acting chief executive, and Welsh Gwaza, the company secretary, have been suspended pending disciplinary hearings. And there’s a new domestic structure to consider. Where will the money to pay for it come from, and how will the consequent disappearance of more than a quarter of professional players’ contracts be handled?

If South Africa’s current lockdown restrictions didn’t prohibit the sale of alcohol, that might have been enough to drive the interim board to drink. Or just to drink: no drunk driving, remember.

First published by Cricbuzz.

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Interim board faces battle with CSA’s many-headed beast

“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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