“I don’t have a magic wand and I’ve not been mandated to carry a big stick and go after people and get them to do things I said need to be done.” – Dumisa Ntsebeza on the chances of CSA implementing the SJN’s recommendations.
Telford Vice | Cape Town
DUMISA Ntsebeza, the newly appointed ombud of CSA’s Social Justice and Nation-building (SJN) project, has six months to investigate evidence of racism in the 30 years of supposedly unified cricket in South Africa. His work will entail interviewing a wide range of stakeholders, holding public online hearings, and writing a report that will include recommendations.
All that? In six months? And while having to navigate the culture of an organisation that has a poor record for implementing independent recommendations, and is so wracked by division that it is at odds with itself on whether the players should take a knee before games? Good thing Ntsebeza is among the country’s most senior advocates: he served on the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which from 1996 to 2003 aimed to give South Africans restorative justice in the wake of apartheid.
“I will adjudicate all complaints that I will have received, which, by and large and overall, relate to unfair discrimination in cricket,” Ntsebeza told an online press conference on Thursday. That he had been given only six months to do so engendered “a sense of urgency”, he said. But he was hopeful of being granted more time should it be needed. He said he wanted to speak to “former players, current players, SACA [the South African Cricketers’ Association], administrators, employees, educators, sponsors, the media and government”, and that he planned to start in the first week of May. He would like to see a transformation conference organised for July to coincide with CSA’s 30th anniversary.
Ntsebeza was prepared to talk to those who didn’t think he had anything to investigate: “There are many people out there who may feel that there is nothing wrong with cricket, either as a sporting good or as a game in South Africa, that has to be transformed. Therefore all attempts at seeking to over-analyse what is happening in cricket might be [seen as] interference in an aspect which already has taken significant strides in the direction of transformation.
“I want to speak to those who feel that transformation might be just one form of interference. Some may even go so far as to say it’s one form of bringing politics into sport. But I’m interested to hear those voices, because they are going to shape my recommendations.”
The establishment of the SJN was prompted by a statement released on July 14 last year in which 31 black and brown former players and coaches said they had been victims of racist treatment and attitudes during their time in the game after apartheid. Eugenia Kula-Ameyaw, a former CSA independent director, drove the SJN’s creation.
“One third of the total black Proteas representatives in the 30 years since unity revealed that they’d all suffered racial discrimination and forms of cultural alienation within the CSA set-up during their careers,” André Odendaal, a member of the interim board, told Thursday’s press conference. “This required CSA to go beyond targets and beyond box-ticking to face deep, often intangible cultural issues and the resilient structural discrimination still operating in our cricket 25 years into democracy.”
Theories that CSA were considering compensating wronged players financially have swirled, but Odendaal said that had not been decided: “There’s been a lot of talk about restoration funds and a large amount of money that CSA is going to pay. We must let people know up front that there has not been a budget for such a fund, and neither have we created a budget for one. What we are going to let happen is to ask our independent transformation ombud to engage with the cricket stakeholders, look at the issues, see how we get to understand that systemic racism persists, and then come to the board with suggestions and recommendations. At that stage CSA, in the light of advocate Ntsebeza’s findings and recommendations, will have to sit and look at the report and decide on the strategic objectives that need to be taken forward, and the process and the budget that go with that.”
CSA has a history of doing exactly the opposite. In August 2012 it promised to “implement the letter and spirit of the recommendations contained in the Nicholson report”, which followed financial corruption within the organisation. Chief among the recommendations was a board consisting of a majority of independent directors. CSA have spent nine years trying to wriggle out of that commitment, which remains unfulfilled.
Did Ntsebeza have any confidence that what he said should happen would happen? “There is no provision, either in the terms of reference nor in any statute, that any recommendations I make must be enforced. [But] the resources and the time that will have been spent on this project should not have been in vain. Did I sense in the discussions that I had with CSA that there is a commitment, an appetite to do this thing, and make sure the recommendations are implemented or implementable? I got that sense, otherwise I wouldn’t have taken the job.
“I don’t have a magic wand and I’ve not been mandated to carry a big stick and go after people and get them to do things I said need to be done. I would hope that those to whom implementation of the recommendations fall will rise to the occasion.
“I have read the Nicholson report; I’ve read all manner of reports about recommendations that were not implemented. I’ve even asked myself why, in the light of all these past failures, are we seemingly doing something that has not achieved anything. My answer is that if we never went back to evaluate what had been done and to find out out what went wrong, and from there getting the benefit of that analysis — trying to see if it could be done differently or if no persuasion can come about which causes the nature of things to change — then the world would have been at a standstill. Changes come about because people who failed in their first experiments went back and tried to achieve a different result.”
That’s an admirable perspective, but Ntsebeza shouldn’t expect it to be shared by everyone he deals with in the coming months. A glimpse of South African cricket’s fraught internal politics was had in November, when the men’s national team refused to take a knee — the global gesture of support for racial justice — before matches in their series against England. They have clung to that position, as have the women’s national team.
“We were a little disappointed that our team did not take the knee, which we explained to them at the time,” Odendaal said. “The board discussed it and were very supportive of such a move. The chairperson [then Zak Yacoob] wrote to the team and to the director of cricket [Graeme Smith] and the answer was that while the team supported the stand against racism and it had been through a pre-season course of bonding and discussing these matters, they decided on a slightly different approach which the group as a whole had bought into.”
That was to raise a fist after the national anthem before the first Test against Sri Lanka in Centurion on December 26. The board differed. “The board, while maintaining its own position, given the strength of Black Lives Matter and [of the] taking the knee action throughout the world, felt in a country with our history that would be most appropriate,” Odendaal said. “It was not something for us a board to decree should happen. It brought across to us that CSA should have a broad policy that all components buy into and that we would continue to talk this through with the players and the team going forward.”
Ntsebeza should thus be under no illusion that he is in for anything but a challenging time. He has, of course, been here before. The TRC was criticised for achieving little in the way of reconciliation, and it lacked the authority to punish the guilty for their crimes. But maybe that is misreading its mission, as Ntsebeza suggested: “Once people are given an opportunity to say, in their own words, the things that hurt them, then that process in and of itself has the magic of restoring to them their dignity.” And that is priceless.
First published by Cricbuzz.
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