The demise of Louis Luyt as president of the South African Rugby Football Union is only the first step towards rugby’s rehabilitation as a national sport. There are many administrators and followers of the sport who, while accepting Luyt’s departure as a necessary expedient to removing an obstacle to the upcoming international tours, resent the National Sports Council’s intrusion into the private affairs of the game.
For them it needs to be pointed out that representative national teams are not private property. Luyt’s downfall came from imagining he was accountable to no one but an executive that he dominated and bullied.
While the sport has been “privatised” – so that most important games are broadcast only on a pay channel, Rupert Murdoch has become the single most influential force in the game and players now command huge fees – rugby is not a brand of footwear or deodorant.
It does not simply revolve around who owns the stadium or who has the television rights. It is a symbol of the hopes and aspirations of all South Africans.
The magic climax of the 1995 World Cup when President Nelson Mandela donned the number six jersey and Francois Pienaar held aloft the William Webb Ellis trophy was a defining moment in the experience of South Africans. A predominantly white sport played mainly by young Afrikaners became a source of pride for millions of South Africans of all races.
It is this goodwill that Luyt idiotically squandered. He could not see that the future of the game was dependent on people who had never counted in rugby before – that the political need to become truly national was as great as the financial imperative to prosper and keep the best players in South Africa.
That is why the call has now gone out for a smart politician, a Frederik van Zyl Slabbert or a Morn du Plessis or even a Francois Pienaar, to lead rugby’s belated charge into the new South Africa. What is required, in short, is rugby’s own Ali Bacher.
Whoever replaces Luyt must understand that cleaning out the stables must especially mean rooting out the ugly underlying racism exposed in the Andr Markgraaff and Toks van der Linde incidents and treating the development of underprivileged players as more than just window dressing to buy international kudos.
The aim must surely be to move beyond rugby’s perennial crises and infighting to produce a team that every South African, even the minister of finance, can support. After all, it’s not Luyt’s scalp that really matters. It’s those men in black who do that Maori jig before they regularly go out and slaughter their opposition. So lets hear it from Trevor Manuel: Vrystaat!
India sets the world a test
India has exploded three nuclear devices for muddled reasons to do with nationalism, the exigencies of internal politics, and international prestige. The most benign explanation is that New Delhi is signalling that it can from now on maintain an advanced nuclear capability by means other than testing, and that it will soon sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
India may plan to follow the test-and-sign strategy of both China and France, with the difference that India is not a declared nuclear power. It now seems that Pakistan is also preparing to test. China, which has signed the treaty, would probably stick to it but could take other, serious, military measures. The shaky structure that until now has kept nuclear weapons under some global control could be endangered.
Why has the new Indian government, led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), taken this step? The answer has little to do with genuine security considerations. Internally, the nuclear policy of the BJP is popular among an electorate which sees it only as a matter of national assertion. It is an issue on which the coalition heads can agree more easily than others.
Internationally, the Indian decision to test may have been triggered by the knowledge that President Bill Clinton, on his trip to Beijing next month, expects to secure Chinese support for the Missile Technology Control Regime, which would end Chinese missile help for Pakistan. Clinton might well then turn to India, as he prepares to visit New Delhi in the autumn, for some balancing action on proliferation.
It looks as if New Delhi saw a window for testing and took it. The result is this dangerous precedent, to which the only real answer is genuine disarmament negotiations by the established nuclear powers. There are no doubt various lesser ways of placating or persuading India. But only progressive nuclear disarmament will remove the justification for the decision India has taken, and which many other countries may be tempted to take.