Acceptance speech of the Minister of Sport and Recreation, Mr Fikile Mbalula, MP, on the occasion of the Release of The Eminent Persons Group (EPG) on Sport Transformation Pilot Study to evaluate preliminary transformation status and the Practicality of Transformation Charter Implementation: Johannesburg
The Programme Director
The Deputy Minister of Sport and Recreation South Africa; Mr Gert Oosthuizen
MECs for Sport and Recreation here present
The Director-General of Sport and Recreation South Africa; Mr Alec Moemi
The President of SASCOC; Mr Gideon Sam
The SASCOC Board Members and CEO; Mr Tubby Reddy
Representatives of National Federations
The Chairperson of the EPG; Dr Somadoda Fikeni
The EPG Members
Honoured Guests
Ladies and Gentleman of the Media
The people of South Africa and sport activists across the globe are well informed of the resistance and protestation against the apartheid policies and practices as they impacted on sport and recreation. Structures such as the National Sport Councils pronounced and fiercely campaigned for Transformation, Unity and Development! The questions that beacons are:
- Have we achieved any of the aforementioned noble ideals?
- Do we have a common understanding of what these ideals mean?
Our assertion is that we have not and it is our urgent task to find the diagnosis before we set up the remedy. The perennial challenges will not be resolved by a numbers game called the quotas system. We have stated in the past that the quotas system is unsustainable and counter-productive. However, the National Sport and Recreation Indaba has agreed to continue to implement the quota system in the interim but to put systems in place to face out the quota system in the long run. Beyond, quotas we need a long term and sustainable system from grassroots level based on the massification of the sector from developmental phase to high performance level.
South Africa as a country and her people has come full circle in the political and economic metamorphosis. Sport has always been at the heart of changes that South Africa has undergone over decades of disunity and search for non-racial sport. South Africans have gone through decades of a divided sporting landscape, international isolation, protests underpinned by the call for no normal sport in an abnormal society.
In 1994 the dawn of democracy heralded the beginning of integration, hope and drive to transform the sporting landscape. A plethora of progressive legislation and policies followed the birth of a new Ministry of Sport and Recreation in South Africa (SRSA). This momentum was given further impetus by the nation building and reconciliation drives manifest in the all-round and popular support for the Springbok Team during the 1995 International Rugby Board Championship and the support for Bafana Bafana during the 1996 Africa Cup of Nations Championship. People from all walks of life, across the racial and age divide threw their weight behind our Teams during this period.
It is now 20 years since the advent of our democracy and our country is still grappling with a skewed, inequitable, unequal and lopsided sporting and recreation landscape. We have recognised this historical injustice much earlier in our engagements in the sector and have already resolved to take practical and concrete steps to deal with this challenge.
In January 2011 the sport fraternity gathered at Misty Hills to chart a new course of action for the development and total transformation of sport and recreation in South Africa. We emerged from that epoch changing Strategic Planning Session with a groundbreaking Road Map to Optimal Performance and Functional Excellence. A road map that characterises the school sport programme as the bedrock of our sport development and places it at the centre of our transformation trajectory. We agreed in unison that key to attainment of an active and winning nation is the urgent need to build a solid sport infrastructure, to build and revamp existing facilities, to rejuvenate our coaching and training framework, to inculcate a strong club and league system, to promote a strong culture of Olympism.
We are cognisant of the fact that the lack of grassroots structures at schools and club levels is our archile’s heel. Until we get the basics right the dream of an inclusive and integrated sports system will forever be deferred. Women and persons with disability will continue to be unfairly maginalised from participation in sport and reaching their full potential.
As a result we convened in November 2011 a National Sport and Recreation Indaba that produced our first ever National Sport and Recreation Plan. The National Sport and Recreation Plan espouses a vision 2030 which is due for review in 2020. The Plan is a fulcrum around which all our programmes and interventions in sport revolve. One of the landmark resolutions and consequentials of the National Sport and Recreation Indaba is the establishment of a transformation commission to drive the implementation of the transformation charter and its attendant score-card. We have in May 2012 given effect to this resolution by appointing the Eminent Person Group (EPG) on Transformation in Sport. As you have heard from the Chairperson of the EPG, Dr Somadoda Fikeni that the Group is hard at work to bring about the actualisation of this National Project.
Given the complexity of the task at hand and the need for the sporting sector to plan for success, the EPG resolved to undertake an independent ‘pilot study to evaluate preliminary transformation status and the practicality of Transformation Charter implementation’. In doing so the Group identified the following sporting codes for the initial pilot evaluation:
- Athletics
- Cricket
- Football
- Netball
- Rugby.
It is important to underscore and emphasise the point that the methodology adopted in the production of the report is based on empirical evidence and scientific data analysis process. For the first time in the history of the evolution of sport in our country, we have a pilot performance evaluation system with a summary of the dashboard enabling us to gauge transformation status and indicators. The project will be expanded in 2014 to include 11 additional codes.
The dimensions and variables employed provide us with a tool to gain a thorough exposition of transformation dynamics. In addition the report ventures into specific observations and recommendations which we will on our part implement. Issues of representativity from a race perspective, women and rural dimension, governance, administration, preferential procurement, gender, equity are all well canvassed in the report.
We have fully grasped the nature of the animal we are dealing with at local, provincial and national spheres of government. The report reveals and confirms our observation that we are dealing with an uncoordinated and non-aligned system in the delivery of sport. This issue requires our urgent attention and will form part of ongoing engagements together with South African Sports Confederation and Olympic Committee (SASCOC) and the MECs. The report confirmed that we need one sporting system for the entire country that is vertically, horizontally integrated and aligned.
The big question is where to South Africa from here?
The constraints placed by the lack of facilities in our communities pose a real threat and is inhibiting our dream of universal access to sport facilities. As the report points out – without facilities children cannot play, without play there will be no teams and no clubs. To this end, we accept the recommendation of the urgent need to accelerate the finalisation of the sport facility status survey and strategy to deal with this major strategic constraint.
The current responsibility for SRSA on MIG is to monitor and support the development of a number of additional sport and recreation facilities servicing poor communities.
Following the mandate given to SRSA at the sports Indaba and also at our joint conference with the local municipalities to look into the possibility of transferring and ring fencing the 15% allocation to municipalities. SRSA engaged with National Treasury, and submitted the first and second application towards the transfer of the ring-fenced grant from MIG to the budget of SRSA. The process was put on hold by national treasury and will be reviewed in the 2015/16 financial allocation.
The allocation would enable SRSA to build an adequate facility infrastructure for poorest of the poor municipalities and plan better for affluent municipalities that already have decent facilities and are not utilising the funds as mandated.
SRSA completed the classification framework, norms and standards revised, sustainability plan and facilities framework. These documents will assist in finalising the facilities audit that the department is currently working on. The department of science and technology has been consulted to assist in the methodology of the audit.
As we receive the report, we invite Legislatures, Local, Provincial and National spheres of government to frankly interact with the report and join hands in the implementation of the recommendations.
To our federations and sports bodies we are calling upon you to embrace the challenges posed by untransformed codes and clubs. We implore you to demonstrate leadership as everything will stand and fall on leadership.
The great African novelist, Chinua Achebe, once said of his homeland, Nigeria:
“The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership. There is nothing basically wrong with the Nigerian character. There is nothing wrong with the land or climate or water or anything else. The Nigerian problem is the unwillingness or inability of its leaders to rise to the responsibility, to the challenge of personal example which are the hallmark of true leadership”
I therefore implore our federations and sports bodies to take a leaf from Chinua Achebe’s book by leading the transformation discourse and implementing the transformation agenda. We will support you as we have been doing, however if you choose to neglect or undermine transformation we will withdraw our support. This is not a threat but stern a warning to any recalcitrant individuals and sport bodies.
We are for the first time in the course of transformation of sport in our country linking the Funding Framework of sport bodies to the multi-dimensional scorecard of the Transformation Charter. 10% of the funding will constitute the guaranteed component of the grant to be utilised for administration. 90% is the conditional grant component whose expenditure will be measured in accordance with the implementation of the Transformation Charter. Any federation or sport body will be benchmarked according to transformation priorities and failure to comply will result in the withdrawal or with-holding of this component of the grant. In future it will pay to be a transformed federation.
Federations that do not invest in development structures will not receive funding from SRSA until they play ball and put their houses in order.
The National Sport and Recreation Act enjoins the Minister to issue guidelines an requirements for the recognition and registration of federations and sport bodies. From now on going forward we are invoking these guidelines to deregister and not recognise untransformed and wayward sport bodies.
As indicated in the past that hosting and bidding for major events will no longer be allowed without a clear demonstration from the federation that such hosting and bidding will advance South Africa’s developmental agenda.
No Team(s) or individuals participating in major events here at home and abroad will receive Government support if such individuals and teams are not responsive to the transformation needs of their sector.
The national anthem, the national colours and national symbols can no longer be used to honour and decorate events of racist, sexist and divisive sport bodies. Symbols of nation building, of non-racial sport, of unity in sport and social cohesion must be reclaimed as sources of inspiration and triumph of the human spirit over evil.
We are also on record having stated that it is our intention and not a threat, but a clear intention to withdraw the national colours, the national symbols and deregister federations that are not implementing the score-card and thereby subverting transformation.
We have since our deployment to the Ministry of Sport and Recreation been engaged by the private sector raising pertinent matters. These include, among others:
- the extent to which principles of good corporate governance are upheld and practiced within the sports sector,
- the level of transparence and utilisation of the sponsored funds for sports development and in the interest of athletes, and
- the extent to which Government can ensure that all role-player in the sport sector derive value for money from the sponsorship.
We have been addressing this issue on a federation by federation basis and we have now reached a point of setting up a framework on a systemic way monitoring revenue streams for federations including the National Lottery Fund. We must be able to provide the private sector with useful inputs on where the real needs are in our sector.
We have been approached and we are currently conducting a dialogue with civil society organisation to further give impetus to community sport and advance sport transformation more so in rural areas and townships. We need such engagements as there is great deal of generosity and of goodwill out there from sports veterans and ex-players who really want to join hands with us. Let us not shut them out, there is a place for all of us under the African skies and sun.
It is regrettable that in this day and age we are still receiving reports that there are sinister elements in our communities concocting plots of keeping certain sporting codes such as rugby, hockey, cricket and netball as the preserve of white privilege and bastion. We refuse to allow our country to slip into this dangerous path and will do everything to empower all communities especially the poor and neglected areas to take their rightful place in a free and democratic sporting landscape.
We will oversee the establishment of provincial and local transformation committees as recommended in the report. The EPG will further avail itself to sports bodies requiring assistance on achieving transformation targets.
Parliament, Provincial Legislature, Sport Councils, institutions of higher learning, further education and training are invited to join hands with us as we seek to put our sport on a developmental trajectory.
Given the strategic nature of the work of the EPG, I have directed the Director-General, Mr Alec Moemi to provide the requisite support and capacity for the EPG to conduct its business professionally and effectively.
I end by expressing a special word of thanks to the Chairperson of the EPG and all members of the EPG for producing this work of high standard and quality.
Thank you.
