Did Thabang Moroe, like Lee Harvey Oswald, Rasputin and the Loch Ness monster, act alone? Not quite.
TELFORD VICE | Cape Town
THE butler didn’t do it. The chief executive did. Not with a candlestick in the library, but with bumbling, badness and booze. Even a casual reading of the summary of the report of a forensic investigation into CSA’s myriad problems pins almost everything that has gone wrong in the game in South Africa since 2016 on Thabang Moroe, who was fired as CEO on August 27.
The unabridged forensic report was used to sack Moroe. Few beyond CSA’s highest authority — the members council — have seen it. CSA released the summary of the report, prepared by its own lawyers, on Monday. It runs to 46 pages and close on 11,000 words — in which Moroe features 71 times, invariably in a poor light. He is challenging his dismissal in court. Asked to comment on the allegations made against their client in the summary and on CSA’s decision to release the document, Moroe’s lawyers have not responded.
The summary damns Moroe for revoking journalists’ accreditation, for all but destroying the suits’ relationship with the players, for not keeping the board properly informed about action taken against provincial affiliates, and for dodgy appointments of rights partners, service providers and staff. And for losing money and spending too much, including on alcohol. Consequently, the summary says, Moroe broke the Companies Act numerous times, brought CSA into disrepute and failed to act in its best interests.
So, like Lee Harvey Oswald, Rasputin and the Loch Ness monster, Moroe acted alone? Is he solely responsible for CSA’s myriad ills? Not quite. Beresford Williams, CSA’s acting president, and Iqbal Khan, one of six board members who have resigned since December, are accused of breaking the Companies Act in potential conflicts of interest. Welsh Gwaza, the company secretary and widely acknowledged as CSA’s chief power broker, could be in trouble for failing to keep the board in the loop on key matters. The board itself “appears to be [in] dereliction of their fiduciary duties”, the summary says.
Little wonder, perhaps, that CSA is fighting the ever louder calls for the release of the full report — which was commissioned by and is owned by the members council, and thus is not a public document. CSA has said it has kept the full findings and the recommendations hidden because of legal considerations, but it is difficult to understand how custodians who really do have the game’s welfare at heart — and not their own interests — cannot see why making the entire report available is the only course of action that has integrity. But integrity is a slippery concept in an organisation in which, at full strength, seven of the 12 board directors also sit on the 14-person members council. Who’s guarding the guards? The guards.
Monday’s release of the summary follows a meeting between the members council and Nathi Mthethwa, the minister of sport, on Friday and precedes CSA’s scheduled appearance before a parliamentary committee on Tuesday. The latter promises to be as bruising as the former for a game that, in the wake of South African cricket’s Black Lives Matter explosion, finds itself in the crosshairs of a government desperate to use the moment to create distraction from more pressing issues, like its shambolic handling of Covid-19.
That comes in the wake of the South African Sports Confederation and Olympic Committee (SASCOC) being directed by Mthethwa to intervene in CSA’s affairs, CSA’s rejection of SASCOC’s demand for unfettered access to the comprehensive forensic investigation’s findings, which it says it would need in order to do Mthethwa’s bidding, and SASCOC reporting back to Mthethwa that, without financial help from government to force CSA to comply, it is unable to follow his orders. At Friday’s meeting, Mthethwa reportedly told CSA it has until Tuesday to give SASCOC what it wants. Whether CSA’s peace offering of the summary will be enough to placate SASCOC, and therefore Mthethwa, remains to be seen.
To be fair to CSA, what it has put out there makes quite some reading. The report, the summary says, identified 24 “areas of concern”. Tellingly, “structure of the board” is only 13th on the list of 20 such areas detailed on Monday, with “organisational design” at No. 16. Those considerations should be uppermost in a probe launched to “conduct an investigation into various governance issues and allegations relating to possible failure of controls and insufficient executive oversight within CSA dating back to a period of [48] months (2016 to 2019)”.
Plenty of such instances were found, although a representative for the members council, John Mogodi, said during on online press conference on Monday: “While we are not claiming the report to be inaccurate it is important to understand that [investigating firm] Fundudzi’s forensic analysis is a single-sided report, and not all of the individuals or parties mentioned have had the opportunity to provide responses to the findings as yet.”
Mogodi read a prepared statement, then disappeared from view without taking questions. And that despite having just said that, “In the interest of cricket and to mend relationships, CSA’s members council unanimously agreed to make the summary forensic report available to all … interested stakeholders, including members of the media.” Good luck mending relationships with the media by not sticking around for questions, which reporters were invited to send separately.
Maybe Mogodi wasn’t keen to talk about people other than Moroe. He spoke of CSA paying “service provider x” the equivalent of USD211,607 for services that were never received. CSA’s acceptance of a rights settlement fee for the 2019 Mzansi Super League caused losses of USD750,897. Not forgetting the USD3,931 Moroe spent on alcohol on his CSA credit card.
CSA’s former chief operating officer, Naasei Appiah, was also implicated. The summary paints him and Moroe as partners in wrongdoing — for instance, Appiah’s alcohol bill over four years was USD12,182 — which might explain why he was fired on August 16. But, unlike Moroe, Appiah was sacked after he had won an appeal against his suspension. That happened not least because several of the charges against him fell away. One example was the fact that CSA do not have a formal policy on credit card use. So who was to say how much could be spent on drink? Bizarrely, CSA insisted Appiah appeal again. When he refused to challenge a decision that had gone in his favour, he was dismissed. Now what?
“This [summary] report would have cleared me a lot quicker than the process I had to go through,” Appiah told Cricbuzz on Monday. “I’ll continue fighting my dismissal. If me and CSA are to part ways it should be a lot more honourable than this.”
Honour? That’s the code followed by butlers, not their employers.
First published by Cricbuzz.
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