Pipe Smoke
By Fanzo Skhova
28/04/2016
Government will not permit SA Sport Governing Bodies like CSA, SARU – I guess SAFA too – to host international tournaments if they don’t meet TRANSFORMATION targets.
Sounds REVOLUTIONARY, doesn’t it?
I don’t like disagreeing with our hard-earned democratic government for it is “committed” to reversing the inequalities of the past – sport included.
Bullying these people will not help a black child access these privileged sporting codes. On this one I have maintained government want to blame the opposite striker for an own goal. Let’s face it. These people allocated themselves best amenities when they were in power. Good parks, big schools with sports facilities, libraries, laboratories and others. We are in power now. HAVE WE DONE SO to equalise the fields? Black players cannot come from nowhere. The present day government must provide facilities to the black child. The call for the inclusion of blacks will reveal the inequalities amongst blacks themselves. In fact it will go as deep as exposing the inequalities that exist amongst blacks along geographical, ethnicity and wealth lines. For example, historically, blacks who made it into the Proteas came from the coastal areas and Gauteng. Therefore, transformation in sport will almost definitely mean different things to a youth from Taung, Thohoyandou, Komatipoort and Bochum. Schools, villages and township in these places do not have proper facilities that we have in Soweto, Pretoria, Mdantsane, or Durban. Not even decent fields for sport as common as soccer or netball. I was watching Rabada being interviewed on SABC Sport @10, he told viewers that his private bat he uses for practise costs about R10 000. I leave it there. These sporting codes are accessed by black children whose parents can afford to enrol them in schools that offer these sporting codes because they have facilities.
Government should take decisive action and…
– provide the basics required for the country to develop blacks into national material.
– revamp and maintain those facilities that were provided by the apartheid government in our villages and townships.
– drop rhetoric and sounding politically correct because it is clear it has now caught up with us. We are just delaying and cheating ourselves.
– leave those people alone and focus on the real challenge of lifting a black child to the same level as the ex-master’s child.
I am waiting for the day we complain that Bafana is too black for a rainbow nation team.
I am raising this issues because tomorrow, I don’t want to come back here and cry foul – accuse whites and privileged blacks for not transforming sport. Today it is about racial exclusion but tomorrow the paradigm will shift. These will be sporting codes of the privileged. Still leaving the black child out and behind.
