The South African Institute of Race Relations has cautioned against calls to apply quotas and similar measures in order to rapidly transform the Springbok rugby team.
The institute said that it was ”encouraging” to see black and white South Africans being united around a common cause.
The institute pointed out that it was necessary to acknowledge that the success of the Springbok team and not its racial make up was the critical uniting factor. It said that sports policy-makers, particularly the portfolio committee on sport, should acknowledge that the success of national teams more than their racial make up or what emblems they wore were important in uniting South Africans.
”Successful sporting achievements, going back to the 1995 Rugby World Cup, the 1996 African Cup of Nations, the award of the 2010 Soccer World Cup, and now the 2007 Rugby World Cup victory, have made a massive contribution to improving race relations,” said the Institute.
Sport is one South African factor that is able to bring people together across racial and class boundaries. The success of sports teams and not their racial make up appears to be the primary unifying factor.
”The relatively greater success of the ‘untransformed’ rugby team in uniting South Africans over the ‘transformed’ cricket team holds an important lesson that South Africans do not identify racial transformation as paramount to performance.”
Institute researcher Chris Kriel, who tracks the issue of rugby transformation at the institute, said that making opportunities available to young black players was extremely important.
”Other than parts of the Eastern and Western Cape, you are unlikely to come across groups of back school children playing rugby,” said Kriel. ”Without development at primary and secondary school level transformation at national and provincial level will not take place. ”
Kriel acknowledged that the rugby unions had active development programmes in place but insisted that these needed to be expanded to reach deeper into poor communities. The help of corporate funders and community organisations to make this happen was important.
The institute said that a host of surveys over the past decade had all pointed to the growing improvement of race relations. Comparing the results of opinion polls on the state of race relations over the past decade, the institute said that approximately 60% of South Africans today believed that race relations were improving up from just over 40% ten years ago. — Sapa