JOHANNESBURG - Cricket South Africa’s interim board, on Thursday suspended two of its members, Omphile Ramela and Xolani Vonya.
Speaking to media on Thursday morning, the board’s chairman, retired constitutional court justice, Zak Yacoob, said Ramela had been “very obstructionist,” during the board’s deliberations, while Vonya had a cloud hanging over him related to his resignation at Easterns.
Yacoob’s interim board was appointed by Sports Minister Nathi Mthethwa at the end of October to oversee various recommendations related to the Fundudzi forensic audit, the Nicolson commission and to stabilise CSA’s administration.
However reports emerged recently about in-fighting amongst the board and, on Thursday, Yacoob directly fingered Ramela, a former president of the SA Cricketers Association.
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“I was shocked,” Yacoob, said about Ramela conduct at board meetings. “He was very obstructive. We spent two hours discussing whether he would accept majority rule.
“When he says things are right they are right, and therefore everyone must listen to him. He’s a young man, who believes that every word that comes out of his mouth is the biblical truth and that if anybody begins to disagree with a word he says you are greeted with a great deal of anger.”
Vonya’s suspension from the interim board related to information provided by the Easterns Cricket Union, who suspended Vonya back in May before he resigned in October. Vonya has been accused of mismanagement of funds and a forensic audit was compiled that IOL Sport understands was submitted to Yacoob.
There was a lot of confusion in Easterns Cricket Union about how Vonya continued to serve as the union’s representative on the Members Council when he was no longer Easterns’ president and then further shock when he was appointed to the interim board.
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Vonya himself has tried to explain away his suspension by hiding behind a report from retired judge Bernard Ngoepe, which he says exonerated him. It didn’t. All that report found was that the ECU didn’t follow proper procedure in suspending Vonya.
“It was a technical thing to set aside the (Ngoepe report), and, in my view, Mr Vonya knows that nowhere did the judge say that he was completely right or that there was nothing against him. He should be asked to read the lines in (Ngoepe’s report) where it says the judge has cleared him.”