Corporate war and cricket

March 16, 2005
By Bukka Rennie

I was of the opinion that when the French-creole looking fellah with the handle-bar moustache had departed West Indian cricket that we would be free at last of that kind of administrator and overseer, of that kind of relationship between the powerful and the subordinate, that has underlined Caribbean history and Caribbean civilisation from the very inception.

All that fellah needed to complete the picture and to "fit the bill" appropriately was a bush-jacket, a whip, a cork-hat and a high-powered rifle. Absolutely nothing changed after he left.

Many prided themselves that new leadership of the people, from the bowels of the people, would emerge to take us unto a fundamentally different system of relationships. None of the leaders of the WICB that followed proved able to take the people of the Caribbean into their confidence, not the Jamaican businessman, not even Banks and Griffith of the present time.

And Bob Marley's philosophical warnings echoes through and through the archipelago: "We got rid of sheriffs but left deputies intact..."

So we are now caught up in a corporate war to the finish, led into it deceptively by the three protagonists, the administrators of the WICB, Cable & Wireless, and Digicel, while our West Indian cricketers, our heroes, are the pawns, and our cricket will suffer untold damage as a result.

If this debacle is not resolved quickly and intelligently, the 2007 ODI World Cup that we are due to host at best will have to be scrapped. To do otherwise will be foolhardy.

But how and why did this sorry impasse come to be, what is its genesis? Cable & Wireless has been here from time immemorial, brought to the table by colonial interest and provided with licences and leases and actual telecommunications mono-poly in the English-speaking Carib-bean for over 100 years.

Those agreements to which West Indian governments, even after Independence, found themselves bounded by law, expired recently and all the West Indian islands sought to have the terms and conditions of those agreements renegotiated in our favour. C&W fought tooth and nail to place obstacles to the demands of the West Indian governments.

Their highly paid lawyers displayed open hostility to the desires of the West Indian governments to open up the communications industry, given the additional Internet and cellular requirements, in accordance with modern practices and the dictates of the WTO particularly on fair and open trade.

The Caribbean had been the stomping ground for C&W for over a century and they did not take too kindly to losing out in almost every situation to the aggressive Digicel.

This Irish-based company with the backing of a consortium of international bankers plus local financing institutions such as Unit Trust and Scotia Bank (T&T) has raised the sum of US$400 million to back their Caribbean expansion. Digicel is now everywhere in the Caribbean and they are boasting to have already grabbed 60 per cent of the cellular market in the region.

Digicel grabbed Caribbean football and made its play for cricket as well, mindful of its importance to the region. C&W, the previous sponsors of the West Indian team, did not or cared not to match the Digicel bid for reasons best known to themselves, and, having lost out to Digicel in everything else, has sought to make a last defiant stand in the area of cricket by holding on to their endorsement of key individuals such as Lara, Gayle, Sarwan etc.

The war is on and both sides are playing dirty. We have to take the attacks and counter attacks with a pinch of salt. All the claims about "women in dressing room" and lies about "not knowing of details of personal endorsements" are to be seen as ammunition geared to heighten the conflict.

The WICB stands to be condemned. Knowing the bitter conflict between C&W and Digicel, why did the WICB not insist that Digicel buy out the personal endorsements? WICB had to know that these two protagonists would never partner each other in any one project; too much bad blood exists between them.

Since the WICB is weak and lacks any competence, the West Indian people must intervene now and dictate the way forward. My good friend Leroy Butcher of St Lucia, a lawyer who lives in Ottawa, puts it best in his e-mail to me. He says inter alia:

"...Maybe we are at the point of dialectical transformation. Maybe Digicel and Cable and Wireless will have brought us to the point where necessity truly will have become the mother of finding new means.

"Maybe the time has come when a new dispensation is needed for West Indies cricket. Maybe it is time to stop thinking that we are helpless. After all, it is 500 years since we were enslaved, 140 since so-called emancipation.

"Why do both Digicel and Cable and Wireless see an opportunity based on our own Caribbean successes and the huge marketing and market potential that its formidable characteristics portend, while all we can see is that if there is no sponsorship there can be no West Indies team?

"Imagine how much worse off we as a Caribbean people would be today if our ancestors had come to believe that their situation was helpless; imagine what we as a people would be today if our ancestors had internalised the idea that we are inferior and that captivity and powerlessness and disenfranchisement and poverty and servility constituted our lot.

"...Why can't we, the Caribbean people for example, demand that the West Indies cricket team, indeed West Indies sports as a whole, be set up under the ownership and control of a public corporation wholly owned by the Caribbean governments, the people and the players themselves, in share proportions that forbid the monopolisation of such a publicly owned company by rich individuals and private corporations.

"That is the precise point at which we will see the accountability that has eluded the WICB, because the management personnel will have to account for their actions and decisions and profitability at annual general meetings or special general meetings of all the shareholders, as all corporate managers have to.

"Contracts can then be structured to give full play to incentives based on performance goals that the Caribbean people deem to be their standard.

"Enough with the secrecy and one-man-ism and the constant repeating of the mantra that 'sports is big business' as if our own history is not one that for centuries has been about finding the path to equality, a new democracy and a higher form of humanity..."

That, dear friends, is well said.