Cricket’s SJN hearings – A good idea gone wrong

Despite its dodgy origin, there are many who believed the Social Justice and Nation-Building (SJN) hearings would be a very good idea – something necessary to try and heal the increasingly polarised and embittered environment of South African cricket.

But now that the SJN report has been made public, what a grave disappointment it has been and what a waste of R7.5 million.

So much evidence has simply been ignored or totally misinterpreted and the legal flaws within the findings reflect poorly on Advocate Dumisa Ntsebeza’s standing as one of our finest jurists. Never mind the poor job done by his assistants.

It now seems clear that the entire focus of the SJN was on getting dirt on Graeme Smith and Mark Boucher. Addressing historic wrongs and racial discrimination was just a side project.

Ntsebeza found Smith’s appointment as director of cricket to be irregular and also accused him of racist behaviour in the past. This despite what I thought was compelling evidence presented by the likes of Cricket South Africa, the South African Cricketers’ Association and former Proteas manager Mohammed Moosajee.

The report almost entirely ignores all of that and goes way outside of its mandate in slamming Smith’s appointment. Surely Ntsebeza is aware that headhunting is a common occurrence in the corporate world and his appointment was approved by a number of people, the majority of whom were black?

But no, it was apparently racist. As was Boucher’s selection as Proteas head coach.

Enoch Nkwe is a very good coach and, in an ideal world, should be the successor to Boucher. But to say he was discriminated against based on the colour of his skin is ridiculous. It ignores the fact Boucher had more experience and more success coaching at the level below the Proteas and the wicketkeeper/batsman’s immense international knowledge from his playing days.

Three franchise trophies in one season point to Nkwe’s potential, but to equate trophies won in second-tier cricket in the Netherlands, semi-pro cricket or junior weeks, and even a second place in the Canadian T20 league, with Boucher’s achievements is ludicrous. The report also makes no mention of the 3-0 hammering South Africa suffered in India under Nkwe as interim head coach just before Boucher’s arrival.

The SJN could really have done with some advice from a former cricketer or anyone with some idea of how high-performance sport works. The total lack of expertise in this regard has been made clear by the report, and there was an early warning sign of this when legal assistant Sandile July asked why Imran Tahir had not stepped down from the Proteas team to allow another spinner a chance!

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I also believe Mr July exhibited a lack of impartiality in his examination of those witnesses who had been implicated. He seemed to implicitly believe that the evidence of the complainants, even those dishonest individuals banned from the game for their involvement in match-fixing, was true.

The allegation made this week that over 250 paragraphs of the complainants’ heads of argument, which were written by July and Fumisa Ngqele, have been simply cut and pasted word-for-word directly into the ombudsman’s report, reflects poorly on the fairness of the SJN process.

These are not just minor matters that need amendment. Most damning of all is Ntsebeza’s own admission in his closing remarks that the evidence presented was not able to be tested. He said he could not make definitive findings, describing his own conclusions as being “tentative”.

And yet he has happily painted Smith, Boucher, AB de Villiers and various other former players and officials as being racist.

The decent thing for Ntsebeza to do would be to pay back half the R7.5 million to CSA for doing half a job, never mind the compensation he might have to fork out for the damage he has done to the reputations of people based on “untested evidence” and “tentative findings”.