AfriForum is going to report Cricket South Africa to the International Cricket Council regarding race quota debacle at the World Cup

31 March 2015

The civil rights organisation AfriForum requested its legal team to submit a formal complaint against Cricket South Africa (CSA) to the International Cricket Council (ICC) as a result of the race prescriptions that were laid down by CSA for the composition of the Protea team for its semi-final during the recent Cricket World Cup. Haroon Lorgat, CEO of CSA, gave instruction shortly before the game got underway that an extra black player must be included at the expense of a white player.

According to Kallie Kriel, CEO of AfriForum, the rules of the ICC explicitly prohibit any form of race discrimination and political interference in cricket. "The willingness of CSA to sacrifice team selection based on merit for the sake of political obligingness to the ANC's race ideology is not only to the detriment of local cricket players and supporters, but has also now been detrimental to the World Cup, which is supposed to be a display window of the world's top players," said Kriel.

Kriel referred to the fact that the race quota system was detrimental to the Proteas from two angles during the team's World Cup semi-final against the Black Caps from New Zealand. "On the one hand the Proteas was prohibited from selecting its best team, while their opponents, New Zealand, scored the winning runs courtesy of Grant Elliot, a South African by birth who left the country because the race quota system deprived him of opportunities," added Kriel.

In addition to the complaint against CSA, AfriForum's legal team is also already busy with encircling preparations to report the South African Rugby Union (SARU) and other national sport bodies. According to Kriel, the preparations are encircling and time-consuming, because AfriForum does not only want to lodge complaints at international sport federations, but is also busy thoroughly investigating other possibilities, like instituting a complaint at the International Court of Arbitration for Sport.

Kriel made an appeal to members of the public to add their name to the complaints that AfriForum is going to submit internationally by sending an SMS containing their name to 45343. R1/SMS

Statement issued by Kallie Kriel, CEO: AfriForum, March 31 2015

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