Cricket SA board must stop wasting money before pointing fingers

From boozy evenings in top London hotels, which then led to potential sponsors being kept waiting the next morning, or extravagant weekends at luxurious places like Zimbali, to the financial disaster of the Mzansi Super League being given to the SABC for free, there was an awful amount of money wasted by Cricket South Africa in the couple of years leading up to December 2019.

There were other factors at play which led to a predicted budget deficit of R654 million, which some believe should be closer to a billion rand, but such largesse certainly didn’t help, and if fired CEO Thabang Moroe was guilty of credit card abuse as charged, then certainly the life of excess being lived by CSA’s top executives did not match the message of frugality they were preaching.

Given that history, it is ironic that shots are now being fired in the direction of Proteas consultants Jacques Kallis and Paul Harris for allegedly earning inflated salaries due to their appointment by their old skipper Graeme Smith, now the director of cricket.

Of course, this narrative should be seen as part of the campaign the ‘Cricket Capturers’ are using to try and get rid of Smith.

To date, Harris has not done any paid work for CSA since January, which means he was actually only on the payroll for two months. Kallis’s situation is the same. But still, they have been singled out as the ones raking in millions that poor old CSA can’t afford to spend.

Kallis and Harris, who were key members of the South African team that went to number one in the Test rankings nearly a decade ago, are sought after overseas and other countries definitely pay a higher daily rate than CSA do. But they have both wanted to give back to the national team and support former captain Smith in his new role.

Of course, it was CSA’s new leadership of acting president Beresford Williams and acting CEO Kugandrie Govender who started all this hoo-ha over consultants when they announced in a meeting with sports minister Nathi Mthethwa that from now on they would employ only black consultants, unless there were exceptional circumstances.

This seemed a mere effort to get the sports minister off their backs. It is not a cricketing decision meant to make the Proteas a more competitive force in an international playground that is becoming more and more ruthless and unequal in terms of the richer nations pulling away from the rest. And I don’t see it being an enormous game-changer in terms of transformation either.

When it comes to transformation, CSA has an extensive history of box-ticking exercises that have made little difference to the horribly unequal situation on the ground, at grassroots.

The Social Justice and Nation-Building project, however admirable its intentions, could end up as another one of these box-ticking exercises. Designed to quell the anger that was fanned by those campaigning to get rid of Smith, head coach Mark Boucher and former acting CEO Jacques Faul, it will also pay reparations to cricketers who feel they were discriminated against.

This could create a headache of industrial proportions for the ombudsman, Advocate Dumisa Ntsebeza, who will have to decide who has genuine grievances and who is merely after some extra money. Many of the most vocal critics of past selection have been those who have shown their lust for money by getting entangled in match-fixing.

I would not be surprised if Ntsebeza also finds himself inundated with applications from white cricketers who feel they have been discriminated against due to the quota system. He is clearly an extremely capable legal brain, but I do not envy the hot potato CSA has given him.

Throwing money at problems is an easy way out of actually having to change the system in order to fix those problems, but the CSA board seems allergic to that sort of hard work.

Instead of worrying about consultants and getting embroiled in reparation payments for past injustices, how about just following through on the recommendations of the forensic reports they have paid millions to commission?

It is absolutely laughable that only now CSA is looking to fully implement the recommendations of the Nicholson Inquiry that is eight years old. Acting president Williams is also in denial and says they have already complied with the vast majority of the recommendations.

Equally absurd was the CSA board’s efforts to keep the Fundudzi Report from the members’ council.

Having spent months saying the report belonged to the members because they initially instigated it, they then turned around and said it was no longer their property, suggesting CSA board members were implicated in the misdemeanours that had Moroe dismissed.

Ken Borland.

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