Modern Athlete Magazine Issue 122, September 2019 | Page 34

OPINION
Problematic
Provinces
Some of SA’s elite women, running for their
provinces, in the 2018 SA Half Marathon Champs
Do the current athletic provinces serve the sport well, or are they just a bygone legacy of the old South Africa, with no real
reason for still existing? Former ASA President James Evans has very strong opinions on this topic.
In the Cape Province, we had Eastern Province (Port
Elizabeth) and Western Province (Cape Town), and the
troubling ones, like Border (a very colonial creation,
since it was in the area which was on the border
of the Cape Colony and the Transkei, where many
frontier wars had been fought in the 19th century),
South Western Districts (an old colonial designation
of an area of the Cape south coast) and Griqualand
West (based around Kimberly, and named after the
supposed home of the Griquas). Of course, the
Transkei was considered to be independent – it was
trans (or over) the Kei River from South Africa. It all
‘made sense’ in colonial and apartheid times, and
tended to fit the structural scheme of South Africa
back then.
Colonial and Apartheid Heritage
In contrast, in the new constitutional, post-
34
apartheid era, there are nine provinces named in the
Constitution of South Africa, but athletics still has
17 ‘provinces.’ How does this make sense? Two
decades after the abolition of apartheid, we still have
Border (the nearest border is with Lesotho, since
the homelands were abolished), Transkei (although
which side of the Kei is ‘trans’ no-one knows), South
Western Districts (which is actually on the east end of
the Western Cape province, and mostly lies north of
Cape Town) and Griqualand West.
Then we have the absurd names: Gauteng North,
Central Gauteng, but no South Gauteng (that probably
would be Vaal Triangle, although whether it fits only
into Gauteng is debateable). And we have North North
West and Central North West, but no South North
West – perhaps because somebody realised how
absurd that would seem.
Only Mpumalanga, Limpopo, Free State and
KwaZulu-Natal are both constitutional provinces and
also athletics ‘provinces.’ So why is this important,
other than for purely nominal reasons? To answer this,
one needs to understand the levels of government
in South Africa, and with that the different levels of
funding available.
Levels of Government
There are three tiers of government in South Africa:
National, Provincial and Local. The Constitution
defines the roles that each plays. Some roles can only
be fulfilled by one tier of government, e.g. the national
government must deal with matters related to defence
or foreign affairs. In other areas, more than one tier
ISSUE 122 SEPTEMBER 2019 / www.modernathlete.co.za
is involved, e.g. transport, where there are national,
provincial and local departments of transport. There
is no national traffic police department, however, and
provincial traffic police only operate on provincial
roads not within municipal boundaries.
With sport, Schedule 5 of the Constitution clearly
lists provincial sport as an exclusive competency of
provincial government, and provides for provincial
government oversight of local sports facilities. In part
B of Schedule 5, it is made clear that local sports
facilities are the competence of local government.
It could be argued, therefore, that provincial
governments may fund provincial sport in whatever
manner it deems necessary. For example, if the
Gauteng provincial government wants to split its
funding into three (Gauteng North, Central Gauteng
and Vaal Triangle), then it can do so, but it cannot
fund sport outside of its borders.
Local government is slightly more complicated. It
consists of three different types of municipalities:
There are eight metropolitan municipalities (Buffalo
City, City of Cape Town, Ekhuruleni Metropolitan
Municipality, City of eThekwini, City of Johannesburg,
Mangaung Municipality, Nelson Mandela
Metropolitan Municipality and City of Tshwane),
and the remainder of the country is broken up into
44 district municipalities, which have under them
local municipalities. This is where the athletics
administrative model falls down hopelessly, as one
can see from the Gauteng example.
ASA’s Gauteng North is essentially Tshwane, so it
I
n 1994 South Africa entered a new era, with a new
Constitution, and a new provincial map. In the
apartheid days, there had been four provinces –
Transvaal, Orange Free State, Natal and the Cape,
and of course, there were the apartheid homelands as
well, including the Transkei. Because of the vast size
of some of these areas, the South African Amateur
Athletics Union (SAAAU) had been split up into what
it called provincial associations, which were based
loosely on the real provinces, and tended to follow the
same terminology. Thus we had Northern Transvaal
(based mostly around Pretoria), Southern Transvaal
(Joburg), Western Transvaal (Potchefstroom) and
Eastern Transvaal (Witbank and Nelspruit), and later
there was Far North (Pietersburg).