So when is a quota not a quota? Easy one this: when it’s a commitment. This, at least, is the explanation given by the United Cricket Board (UCB) this week as it explained its unexpected and controversial decision to scrap quotas at international and provincial levels.
It’s worth backtracking briefly to last weekend when the UCB staged a transformation conference just north of Pretoria. About 150 delegates attended, roughly 70% of them black (in the generic sense of not being white), and it was these delegates who came up with the notion that at the highest level of the game and the stratum just below that, quotas had outlived their usefulness.
There is no doubt that the delegates were influenced by the arguments of those players most immediately affected by quotas — black players who have had a taste of international cricket such as Ashwell Prince and Roger Telemachus. Their point is simple: if you’re going succeed as an international player you need to be entirely sure in your own mind that you deserve to be there on ability and you’re not just making up the numbers.
There was also a particular statistic that played a part in the thinking of the conference. Last season the UCB policy was to include three black players in each of the 11 provincial teams with an overall target of at least 44 players taking part in the provincial system. As it happened, 66 black players played provincial cricket last season, a total 50% above the initial target.
With all this on board, the conference moved that quotas at the two top tiers be scrapped, the UCB’s general council adopted this as policy and it seemed that cricket might have taken another step forward. But not so fast, sunshine.
On Wednesday, after a meeting with the minister of sports and recreation (and an assortment of other ”stakeholders”) it was announced that the World Cup squad would contain five black players and that a ministerial task force would attempt to verify the UCB’s claims that transformation was working.
To take the second point first, the findings of the task force might well depend on its composition. It would not be difficult to staff such a body with people like former Gauteng chairperson Dr Mtutuzeli Nyoka, who has already described the UCB version of transformation as ”a joke”, and those members of the former Eastern Province board who found themselves unceremoniously dumped last month when the UCB had the province placed under judicial management.
If this is the case, Sports Minister Ngconde Balfour’s committee might well find the UCB is hopelessly short of its own transformation targets. A broader-based inquiry, on the other hand, would probably agree with the UCB’s findings.
It is the question of the World Cup squad that has drawn the most attention, however. On Sunday the UCB announced it was scrapping quotas. On Wednesday, after meeting with Balfour, it said there was a commitment to having five black players (or ”players of colour” to use the UCB’s own awkward terminology) in the World Cup squad. There has been some confusion as to the exact size of this squad. The number 16 was freely bandied about on Wednesday while at least one news agency set the figure at 14.
In fact it’s 15 and while this may seem like nitpicking, when you’re talking numbers it’s probably as well to get them right. The devil, as one UCB official was keen to point out last weekend, lies in the detail.
The UCB’s line is that this commitment does not constitute a flip-flop of its weekend decision. The commitment goes back four years to an argument presented by the then UCB managing director Ali Bacher when he sought to enlist government support for a World Cup in South Africa.
It is understood that the UCB was reminded of this by Balfour on Wednesday, but again the detail is important: the figure refers the squad, not the 11 who take the field for any particular game.
In practical terms, South Africa’s World Cup squad will almost certainly be roughly one-third black in any event, government policy or not. The number of black players capable of stepping up to international level increases with each passing season. One compelling argument for the scrapping of quotas is that they appear to be becoming redundant anyway.
But it’s not quite as straightforward as this. Beneath any argument for scrapping or retaining quotas (and let’s be fair, there is no question that in many obvious cases, quotas have helped advance black cricket) lies the question of trust, or the lack of it.
Perhaps the most significant feature of the UCB’s change of approach last weekend was that it came out of a reservoir of trust and goodwill that many thought had been buried by the bickering and squabbling and unhappiness of last summer. Notwithstanding the ”commitment” reiterated on Wednesday, it is this goodwill that South African cricket needs to build on.
Examined closely, the UCB does not seem to have backtracked on last weekend’s decisions, not at this stage anyway, although it has had to hop around nervously over the past few days. If anything, the drive towards transformation has deepened but the emphasis has shifted towards appealing to common sense and good intentions as opposed to driving them towards targets with a stick.
It’s an approach all South African sport needs to consider. And there’s one final point. Anyone who seriously believes that Gerald Majola and the frequently abrasive Percy Sonn are intent on preserving cricket as an outpost of white domination seriously needs his or her head read.