USA's Carissa Moore(C) Gold medalist, South Africa's Bianca Buitendag(L) Siver medalist and Japan's Amuro Tsuzuki celebrate on the podium at the Tsurigasaki Surfing Beach, in Chiba, on July 27, 2021 during the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games. (Photo by Olivier MORIN / various sources / AFP)
Sports Minister Nathi Mthethwa says our Olympic team does not reflect SA demographics, but President Cyril Ramaphosa announces an unrepresentative Cabinet reshuffle.
Demographic representivity is used when convenient, hypocritically.
And the SA Sports Confederation and Olympic Committee (Sascoc) is in a pickle over money to reward our two Olympic medallists, whose skin colour shouldn’t matter but has been highlighted on social media.
Unquestionably, the National Party must be blamed for formal racial classification and discrimination. But that doesn’t make current racial obsessions more palatable.
Politics is part of Olympic history. For example, the multiple triumphs of Jesse Owens at the 1936 Games in Berlin disrupted Adolf Hitler’s attempts to showcase Aryan racial superiority.
In 1964, SA was banned from the Olympics because of apartheid. The 1968 Mexico City Olympic Games were memorable for the black power salutes by African-American athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos on the podium while the American anthem was playing. And so on.
Yet despite all the above, it’s a crying shame that 27 years into democracy, our sports minister is more concerned about race than about winning.
Racial inequalities remain. However, the ANC government has not done nearly enough to improve sports facilities and opportunities in schools and elsewhere. Never mind sports fields, the government isn’t even providing decent toilets.
Seven years after five-year-old Michael Komape drowned in a school pit latrine, the government says it hopes to eradicate these death traps by 2031. That’s far too long to wait. Where does all the money go? Much of it to Dubai via the Zuptas. And almost every government department and municipality is riddled with corruption and dodgy audits.
Mthethwa’s portfolio includes arts and culture, dogged by the alleged disappearance of R300 million in Covid-19 relief funds intended to help struggling artists.
Indeed, the plundering of Covid-19 funds has been contagious across government departments. At the core of this is cadre deployment, official ANC policy.
Columnist Justice Malala put it well on Monday: “The belief in and practice of cadre deployment lies at the heart of the failure to deliver services. Party loyalty trumps competence, qualifications and loyalty to SA.”
When the stated aim is to give preference to abantu bethu (“our own people”), doors are opened for the toxic pairing of incompetence and corruption. When the legitimate aim of transformation is used as a smokescreen for cadre deployment and cadres interfere in sport, of course sport will suffer.
There is no government money to reward excellence because that’s the last thing on the minds of administrators, who now have to negotiate with sponsors.
Before, during and after apartheid, this country has consistently produced sportswomen and men of the highest calibre, not all of whom received the recognition they deserved. And too many left our shores.
Racism has been a blemish. That cannot be ignored by anyone with a knowledge of our sporting past. But please let us not allow comments like Mthethwa’s to undermine the pursuit of excellence across all sporting codes.
And let’s reward those who win Olympic medals and do this country proud.
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