South Africa’s sports minister has announced that he will no longer “beg for racial transformation”, but will start forcing the country’s sporting federations to fulfil racial quotas.
Fikile Mbalula said in a speech on Sunday that the cricket, rugby, netball and athletics federations would be banned from bidding for any international tournaments until their numbers of black players improved.
South Africans of colour, more than 90% of the population, remain the minority in starting line-ups more than two decades after the end of draconian white-minority rule which prohibited them competing at the highest level.
For more than 50 years, black athletes were banned from representing their national sides. Thanks to these policies, it’s taken South African cricket more than 20 years to produce Temba Bavuma, who earlier this year became the first black cricketer to earn the country a century in Test cricket.
The spectre of exclusion still hangs over South African rugby, too: under Springbok coach Heyneke Meyer, who resigned in December, there were frequent complaints of black players being sidelined while white players were being played out in position.
But despite this reality, many pundits have expressed concern that Mbalula’s stance is too harsh and will merely harm South Africa sport at a time when the national rugby federation was planning to take part in next month’s bidding for the 2023 World Cup.
They say quotas go against the central tenet of professional sport – that an athlete be chosen on merit alone. But in a country like South Africa, sport has never been about merit.
— City Press Online (@City_Press)
April 28, 2016RT @AndiMakinana: The FW de Klerk Foundation says Fikile Mbalula has officially imposed racialism in sport. pic.twitter.com/12YyoLo2ly
For as long as I can remember, successive government post 1994 have always encouraged racial quotas in the selection of its national teams – for rugby it is 50% of the squad by 2019, and for cricket at least 4 of the 11 are required to “players of colour” – but failure to comply has had little or no consequences.
But at present, both the cricket and rugby teams would need to increase the number of black players threefold to meet the 50% transformation targets agreed upon by the unions and the government.
Ali Bacher, former managing director of South African cricket has come out in support of Mbalula, warning that “sporting federations have been long warned about a possible government backlash” for their failure to find and nurture black talent.
For South Africa, these quotas are vital means through which to reverse the apartheid policies of racial division and systemic disadvantage.
One doesn’t just wake up playing sport at a professional level. Talent needs to be identified and nurtured from a young age, and there need to be mechanisms in place to find aptitude at a grassroots level and make sure that it is developed.
The problem in South Africa lies in the fact that such mechanisms were designed to find only white players, and the authorities which have remained in place since the 1950s have never adequately invested in undoing this trend, meaning white players continue to have an unfair advantage.
What quotas do is force these federations to attract players of colour and develop them to a professional level. Mbalula’s plan means sporting authorities must become players in the national process of inclusivity and transformation.
In a country where there was a deliberate effort to suppress such talent, this is a necessary and overdue step forward.
