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June 24, 2008Posted by Stephen Gelb on 06/24/2008 in Stephen Gelb
To BEE or not to BEE?
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This follows the furore in March when CSA President Norman Arendse allegedly (he denies it) forced the replacement of Andre Nel by Charl Langeveldt in the team to tour India. The media and popular reaction then was: We won’t be fielding our best side! Race quotas are all very well lower down, but not for the national team! This ignored the facts. Langeveldt had performed better than Nel in the subcontinent, and Nel was no longer in the Test XI anyway. He had been replaced by Morne Morkel, so the argument was actually about the reserve seamer spot.
The new guidelines have provoked a sigh of relief, together with moans over some of the recommendations: Politics has not been fully exorcised from cricket!
Affirmative action invariably provokes illogical arguments and the cricket quota debate is no exception. Racial transformation targets – percentage shares with deadline dates – are now fully accepted by SA business, covering ownership, management, skilled labour force, purchases of goods and services and even customers. By and large, formerly white corporations have recognised the necessity of transforming and even its benefits. But far from being voluntary, it needed pressure and regulation to chivvy corporate foot-draggers. Government contracts depend on meeting BEE targets, big shareholders demand change, and legislated codes are in place.
Cricket boardrooms and executive offices are transformed, as evidenced by Arendse, Ray Mali et al., though there is the odd disgruntled (Ray) White. The national team has included black players on merit for years. So why the recent fuss?
I think it stems from a deep contradiction within national sports bodies. Fans following their sport enjoy what we economists call a ‘pure public good’ – all can be fans together and no aspiring fan can be excluded. Fans without the admission fee maybe can’t watch their sport ‘live’, but can be fans nonetheless. Public goods are best supplied by a single provider, usually government representing ‘the public’. Think of national defence, another public good.
National sports organisations are usually monopolies, but aren’t publicly accountable like government agencies or corporations listed on stock exchanges. They are private in character – non-transparent and self-regulating – if not privately-owned. This helps them enormously to evade the consequences of poor performance, limit players’ freedom of movement, and vigorously protect their monopoly power (I’ll write about IPL vs ICL soon).
But the fans have neither ‘exit’ nor ‘voice’ options to register their disapproval. They cannot switch to a market competitor nor hold ‘their’ sports organisations to account to force a change of behaviour. They carry all the risk: if the team does badly, they suffer, but they can’t change teams.
Back to Arendse, who was at worst ham-fistedly forcing employees (the selectors) to carry out company policy. His goal, if not his method, was that of any manager. The hostile reaction was in response to his own lack of transparent accountability. The real problem is deficient corporate governance, affirmative action is simply the context for the fight. So don’t expect the new guidelines to sort things out.
Can anything be done to improve accountability? Perhaps, though as I said, the problem is at the heart of national sports organisations. But I’m out of space, so I’ll have to come back to it another time.
Posted by: Murali Dhanakoti at June 26, 2008 2:51 PM
A very objective and sensible take on a very sensitive subject. As an Indian fan, upon reading about Nel's omission and him publicly express outrage, I thought he was justified in saying so. No sportsman deserves to have his spirits crushed because of past missteps of his society. But, I wasn't aware of the fact that Langeveldt had fully deserved his place, I feel stupid for jumping to conclusions, but then again like you said the topic of racial transformation sometimes causes to put emotion ahead of logic. I am in full accordance with your observation that lack of accountability leads cricket boards to act as per their whim and not being bothered overly by the consequences of their actions (BCCI is a prime example).
Posted by: David Barry at June 28, 2008 5:32 AM
I hope that South Africa continue to pick players like Charl Langeveldt. I'm not talking about transformation targets. Langeveldt wasn't very good, and I like to see South Africa lose.
The selection of Langeveldt was bizarre, whoever was at fault - his supposedly good record in the subcontinent comes from a couple of low-scoring ODI's. His recent domestic bowling was very much inferior to that of Monde Zondeki, who probably deserved to be selected for the Indian tour on merit in the first place, and happens to help the quotas as well.
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Shanaka Amarasinghe Possessing the best disguised googly in Sri Lanka (because no one has ever really seen it), Shanaka is the finest legspinner to never have played top-level cricket. He is a popular cricket analyst and host of The Score, the No. 1-rated, if slightly infamous, sports show on radio in Sri Lanka. While in England playing rugby, he earned his LLM at King’s College and is a lawyer by training if not inclination. He is also an actor, a journalist, a writer, and thinks he is a comedian.
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Mike Holmans, a database consultant by profession, has spent thirty summers (and a few winters) going to the cricket. Brought up in one and working in the other, his dearest wish is for a season to end with Yorkshire winning the county championship by beating runners-up Middlesex by one wicket with five minutes to go. If it’s also a summer when England win the Ashes, so much the better.
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Michael Jeh Born in Colombo, educated at Oxford and now living in Brisbane, Michael Jeh (Fox) is a cricket lover with a global perspective on the game. An Oxford Blue who played first-class cricket, he is a Playing Member of the MCC and still plays grade cricket. Michael now works closely with elite athletes, and is passionate about youth intervention programmes. He still chases his boyhood dream of running a wildlife safari operation called Barefoot in Africa.
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Saad Shafqat takes special pride that his cricket-watching life began during the three-month interval between Javed Miandad's debut Test in Lahore and Imran Khan's 12-wicket haul at Sydney. Although a practicing neurologist based in Karachi, cricket has never been far from his activities. He has co-authored Javed Miandad’s autobiography Cutting Edge and has been a contributor to Cricinfo since 2005. His regular column Reverse Swing appears fortnightly in Dawn, Pakistan’s leading English daily.
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