South Africa's National Sports Council (NSC) yesterday revoked its call for an international boycott of the Springbok rugby team, thus opening the way for pending tours of South Africa by Ireland, Wales and England.
The decision, taken after talks between the NSC and the South African Rugby Football Union (SARFU), brought an end to a week of high drama which saw the resignation of SARFU president Louis Luyt and the first verbal salvos in an NSC campaign to isolate South African rugby.
Under a deal hammered out between the two sports organisations, a four-man interim committee, composed of two members from each organisation, was mandated to prepare a programme for fundamental transformation of the administration of South African rugby. The NSC had earlier pressed for the resignation of Luyt and SARFU's entire executive committee.
Charging them with responsibility for nepotism, malfeasance and racism, it threatened to work for the re-imposition of the international boycott if they did not resign en masse. The issue came to a head a week ago on May 7th when the deadline for the ultimatum expired. SARFU rejected the demand for its executive to resign en masse. But in a informal show of hands the majority of its executive and half of its affiliated unions signalled their belief that it was time for Luyt to go, that there was no hope of a negotiated compromise with the NSC as long as he remained at the helm.
Luyt succumbed to the pressure last weekend and formally telefaxed his resignation to SARFU on Monday, thereby relieving the tension and drawing hints from NSC president Mluleki George and his chief executive officer, Mvuso Mbebe, that a compromise accommodation was in the offing.
At a special meeting on Tuesday the SARFU executive refused to resign, declaring that it could not do so under the SARFU constitution. But it took several steps to avert a renewed clash with the NSC and, behind it, the ruling African National Congress and its ally, the Congress of South African Trade Unions. The placatory steps included: co-option of the four black executive members who resigned in protest against Luyt's initial refusal to quit; plans to hold an extraordinary general meeting to amend the constitution to facilitate the immediate holding of an election for a new executive, a move which necessitates the resignation of the existing executive and thus provides for formal compliance with the NSC demand; appointment of a special committee, whose members included two of the black co-opted black executive members, to negotiate with the NSC.
Those negotiations took place yesterday and led, to the vast relief of most rugby enthusiasts, to the cancellation by the NSC of its campaign to scupper the forthcoming tours by the Ireland, Wales and England and the tri-nation series between South Africa, New Zealand and Australia. Yesterday's NSC statement did not mention the judicial commission of inquiry into SARFU, which Luyt successfully blocked by winning a legal battle in the High Court. But observers anticipate that an independent inquiry will be part of the programme devised by the four-member interim team.
