Nathi Mthethwa and his predecessors have failed South African sport

Johannesburg — Cricket South Africa was front and centre at the parliamentary portfolio committee for the sport, arts and culture this week, and it was all very depressing.

Not so much from Cricket SA’s perspective. Lawson Naidoo, the chairman of the board and acting chief executive Pholetsi Moseki did as good a job as they could answering committee members’ questions about CSA’s many problems and how the organisation is attempting to deal with those. Rather the quality of questions and the opinions held by the majority of committee members showed a dismal lack of insight and meant that the oversight they claim to practise was extremely underwhelming.

Besides the Democratic Alliance’s Veronica van Wyk, none of the committee members appeared to have properly studied any of the reports that have been published about CSA in recent years. Most importantly putting the context of CSA’s problems around transformation and development needed to be seen in the light of the sports, arts and culture department’s own shortcomings on those topics.

CSA made a point of highlighting the following passage from the Social Justice and Nation-Building report: that the issues facing cricket “are a complex interaction of multiple factors stemming from the history of the country and consequent socio-economic factors that prevail today.”

We’ve reached a point in SA where its become very clear that it is the government that is failing this country. And it is the same for sport.

It’s become easy to beat federations over the head every year about transformation numbers as they pertain to the elite teams chosen by an organisation for an event. The Proteas, Olympic squad and Springboks all get threatened with sanctions of some sort, yet what gets