It was straight from the Jonas Savimbi School of daylight robbery. With the ballot papers counted and the unrigged result declared, cue dummy-spitting, foul-crying toy tosser.
Mike Stofile’s ”there is no place for blacks in South African rugby” is the most predictable post-South African Rugby Union (Saru) presidential election utterance since unification.
You could really see this one coming a mile away. Fact is, if that statement didn’t come from Stofile more people would be in agreement.
If indeed there is no place for blacks (and by this he meant black Africans) in South African rugby, did it take last Friday’s election for the penny to drop? He has, after all, occupied a seat among the game’s top-three administrators in the past four years.
The first two years he served as vice-president and the past two as deputy president. He had 48 months to raise the alarm and he opted to stay mum.
Does a three-vote shift (the margin by which the incumbent Oregan Hoskins defeated Stofile in the presidential race) really condemn rugby in its entirety to a whites- and coloureds-only elitist domain?
Fact is, part of Stofile’s assault on the throne had its foundations in the fact that he is black. There were no other black African nominees for the positions of president, deputy president or vice-president — a fact that Stofile figured could work in his favour when the crosses were drawn.
Saru, in its infinite wisdom, has it cemented in its constitution that two blacks must occupy the top three positions, but it does not draw any racial distinctions in the make-up of that pairing. Saru’s president’s council has, however, for a large part since readmission taken it upon themselves to install a coloured and a black African to allow for the ”two blacks in the top three” provision.
This is an arrangement with which Stofile was hardly at odds. Until last week when 24 delegates out of 45 pointed him back down a dusty road to the Eastern Cape.
For him to suggest that South African rugby excludes blacks is a little rich. It was, after all, his vote that helped install Peter de Villiers as the Springboks’ first black coach. Stofile was happy to then label De Villiers as black, but when the election result went against him De Villiers’s pigmentation and that of Hoskins and newly installed deputy president Mark Alexander fell short on his ”blackometer”.
Stofile lost the election, not because he is black but because he was considered an inferior candidate for the job. His sense of entitlement stems from the fact that he was a political prisoner, but he offers pie-in-the-sky gobbledegook when probed on his vision for the game. His frequently ill-considered pronouncements in no small way contributed to his vertiginous drop from the game’s hierarchy.
Stofile’s tirade last year, and the year before, against erstwhile Springbok and World Cup-winning coach Jake White, was not something that went unnoticed, not even by his fickle fellow president’s council members.
Then he flew off the handle because rugby closed a new broadcast deal with SuperSport, arguing it should have shopped around. What? Knock on a door in Henley Street, Auckland Park, in the hope that the SABC has the resources and inclination to show them the money?
Stofile now finds himself in rugby’s wilderness, but some reports have suggested he is prepared to return to the bottom of the ladder at his old club, Red Hearts. If blacks are excluded from the main table in South African rugby, why bother starting again?
The question that would then arise is: should Stofile be censured for his inflammatory statements?
”Under our disciplinary code probably not, but I think he could have fallen foul of not using the proper channels for that kind of outburst. In terms of him not using the right forum there might be a case,” Hoskins said.
If Stofile’s statement last week wasn’t so broad and sweeping it might have been less open to ridicule.
There may well be a dearth of black African representation in rugby’s higher echelons, but that is not because of exclusionist policies. There is nothing that precludes black participation in rugby’s major decision-making processes. The clubs vote you in at provincial level and then your peers judge whether you are capable of progressing further.
Board members can also be co-opted. Hoskins was almost indignant about the suggestion that blacks are being excluded. ”That clearly is not so. We have a constitution that ensures non-exclusion. What Mike Stofile failed to say when he had his outburst last week is that there are, according to his definition, three blacks on the president’s council. In addition, the chairperson of the board is Mpumelelo Tshume.
”Next to my position that is probably the highest position in South African rugby. He heads up the commercial arm, which has huge authority in the way in which the game is run.
”In Border, Stofile’s home province, where the playing numbers are 90% African and the majority of the administration is African, Cliff Pringle, a coloured, is the president. He was elected because he was the best man for the job.
”We must look for the right people to add value. We mustn’t talk about race to the point where it doesn’t make sense any more.”