Pretoria - Government will not rescind the current penalties and directive against various sporting bodies, the sport and recreation department said on Saturday.
Instead, the Eminent Persons Group (EPG) on transformation in sport secretariat would work with all the federations to “address the systemic gaps and make recommendations” to Sport and Recreation Minister Fikile Mbalula for his consideration of progress or lack thereof when the Transformation Barometer was considered and an announcement made for the 2016/17 review.
At the end of April, Mbalula announced that he had revoked the privileges of Athletics South Africa (ASA), Cricket South Africa (CSA), Netball South Africa (NSA), and the South African Rugby Union (Saru) to host or bid to stage any major international events. He said they had failed to meet their transformation targets.
Mbalula met the boards of ASA, CSA, NSA, Saru, and the SA Football Association (Safa) in Pretoria on Saturday morning. Also present was SA Sports Confederation and Olympic Committee (Sascoc) CEO Tubby Reddy, as an implementing partner of the Transformation Charter Sports Barometer and memorandum of understanding with the respective federations.
“The meeting is a sequel to the minister's announcement and release of the 2015/16 EPG Transformation Status Report and Transformation Barometer on the 25 April 2016,” the department said in a statement afterwards.
“The meeting was occasioned by the request of the five sport federations to ventilate, discuss, and make recommendations on remedial steps to be taken to redress the gaps in the system.
The aforegoing pertains to the EPG's recommendations followed by the implications of the penalties and the implementation of the directives issued by the minister due to the federations' under-performance on their individually set transformation targets for 2015/2016 year under review,” it said.
“All federations engaged the minister constructively on pertinent issues ranging from the involvement of provinces and districts in transformation, strategic leadership from the various sports federations and their boards on transformation, dealing with systemic shortcomings in data collection, access, demographics, data quality, and analysis.
“After an in-depth and extensive discussions the meeting noted that government will not rescind the current penalties and directive,” the department said.
The meeting had further agreed on general key deliverables that required acceleration, including support for women sport, rural sport development programme intervention strategies, improving the school and club system, focusing on academies and delivering support to under-age teams, strategic levers for enhancing scientific and technical support for all teams, and preferential procurement to be applied by sporting federations.
Mbalula had noted that “transformation is not an event but a process, however it has to be implemented rapidly. We believe that this is a key programme that is necessary for the sake of our country. We need to implement it with the necessary vigour, determination, and conviction”.
“The meeting noted the progress and commitments placed by the federations to close the gaps where they have not been able to achieve the set voluntary targets,” the department said.
African News Agency