South Africa has sacrificed the nation’s sporting potential once before under apartheid, and the country should not make the same mistake again, says official opposition leader Tony Leon.
In his weekly internet column, SA Today, the Democratic Alliance leader said the issue of racial quotas in sport is one that South Africans have been debating ”for several years”.
Now Butana Komphela — the African National Congress National Assembly sport and recreation portfolio committee chairperson — has announced that the ruling party will seek to pass legislation forcing teams to achieve demographic ”representivity” right down to the schools level.
Though the national ministry said such legislation will be a last resort, it has also said that the voluntary route to transform sport has not worked.
Leon argued that decades after sport activist Hassan Howa famously declared ”no normal sport in an abnormal society”, South Africa now faces the prospect of abnormal sport in a normalising society.
Leon noted that in 1971, when the ANC was rallying support for the international boycott against South African sport, the ANC’s Abdul Minty prepared a submission to the United Nations unit on apartheid.
Minty wrote: ”The moral position is absolutely clear. Human beings should not be willing partners in perpetuating a system of racial discrimination. Sportsmen have a special duty in this regard in that they should be first to insist that merit, and merit alone, be the criterion for selecting teams for representative sport.
”Indeed, non-discrimination is such an essential part of true sportsmanship that many clubs and international bodies have express provisions to this effect. For example, the first fundamental principle of the Olympic Charter states: ‘No discrimination is allowed against any country or person on grounds of race, religion or political affiliation.”’
In opposition to the previous regime, the ANC has adopted ”a principled non-racial position” but now that it has gained power, ”it is enforcing a policy that is obsessed with race and what its own documents refer to as ‘the continuing battle to assert African hegemony”’.
”If the state applies racial criteria to cricket and rugby, what is next? Will there be quotas for bridge and lawn bowls? Will the government start telling South African chess players to move the black pieces first?
”The damage is suffered not only by the players and participants, but also by the administrators of sport.
”Instead of spending their time and resources improving South African teams and developing new talent, they are being forced to waste energy on racial bean-counting. The result is that our national sports teams seem to lurch from one crisis to the next.
”If there is any role for the state in sport, it is to ensure that people in previously disadvantaged communities are given access to the facilities, training and opportunities that they need in order to participate and compete in sport as equals.
”The state should also make certain that no one who wishes to participate in sport is the target of prejudice or racial discrimination.” — I-Net Bridge