Financial Mail and Business Day

Zelt Marais’ fate shows folly of clubs picking maverick officials

GAVIN RUCK N ROLL

One of the nonnegotiables for the outcome of SA Rugby ’ s administration of Western Province should be that Zelt Marais is remembered as the last president of the union to have a say in the professional side of the game.

The lesson about Marais is a salutary one, not just on why the old system of having amateur clubs electing officials who preside over a professional sporting entity doesn’t work, but also how horribly wrong it can go when the person they elect based on his popular-appeal rhetoric turns out to be a maverick who does his own thing.

It has been a while since I have written about the affairs of WP, and that is mainly because the chickens all seemed to be coming home to roost at once. I realised unless I wanted to say “I told you so” all I could do was trot out the same line that I have since long before Marais became president: the system just doesn’t work.

A system that enables someone from a club that operates on an annual budget of say R250,000 to be elected into a position where he has a major say over the affairs of an organisation that operates on a budget of many hundred times that is just intrinsically wrong.

A system in which the lower-budget clubs can be the pivotal movers in taking WP and Stormers in a different direction is also patently wrong.

A system that is driven by people who know they are in a position because of promises they made to clubs during the electioneering process and therefore need to kowtow to their demands or they won’t last in their position is also wrong given that the people in the clubs driving the agenda lack experience of professional rugby.

In the Western Cape what they too often do know a lot about is politics, referring as much to the rugby politics between clubs and factions as to broader politics. The line that kept coming out of Marais’s initial supporters that it “is now our turn to be in charge” is maybe understandable given the history in which voices weren’t heard or were ignored, but factionalism and settling of old grudges does not make for efficient governance in a professional sporting environment.

Maybe his refusal to adjust to the realities that confront every

WP president once the position is taken up is what differentiated Marais from some of his predecessors.

Becoming WP president must be a bit like becoming the Springbok coach. When you are running for the position you think you know everything and you have grandiose plans on how to right perceived wrongs but once you are in position the reality hits that it might be easier said than done.

There are challenges you didn’t know about, and in the WP president’s case you quickly realise professional sport and your popular appeal message may not marry as easily as you thought. Before Marais, the incoming WP presidents at least tended to adjust a’bit to what was demanded by the new reality they were confronted with. Marais didn t.

Initially, he blindly followed what had been asked for him by his kingmakers, then when those decisions started coming back to bite him he started to become a lone ranger who seemed obsessed with taking as much power as he could for himself.

The last few months of his reign beggared belief.

He was clearly isolated, and many of his supporters had turned on him, yet he reacted like one of those baddies in a cowboy movie who just carries on shooting and killing even though he knows he is outnumbered and his time is up.

The collateral damage from Marais’s reign is how many good people he chased away from the sport.

We are not referring only to the people he suspended when he started shooting blindly from his cornered position, but also those who resigned because they just couldn’t deal with his abuse of power.

Hopefully, some of those might filter back into the system but it does raise a question that highlights another key problem with elected officials being given too much power: what is the limit to their accountability?

What happens to Marais now? It wasn’t his money he was playing with. So does he just ride off into the sunset with pride dented but his own financial position not affected?

SA Rugby hasn’t ruled out an investigation into the key players on a possible charge of reckless governance. That could lead to Marais and some of his cohorts being banned from assuming any rugby positions for the rest of their lives.

That seems a small price to pay though for the damage that has been wrought. The only way to prevent a repeat is to ensure there are no positions filled by people elected out of the amateur game that can have the inordinate impact on the running of the professional game that Marais’s disastrous reign as WP president did.

SPORTSDAY

en-za

2021-10-18T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-10-18T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://timesmedia2.pressreader.com/article/281994675682494

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