World Athletics sets deadline: remove ASA president or face suspension

World Athletics has put a deadline in front of Athletics South Africa, and the message is blunt: remove the president or face suspension. In a letter sent to the national federation last week, the global governing body told ASA it needed to sack president James Moloi for misusing a federation credit card, and it needed to overhaul its constitution to address multiple governance concerns. For a sport that has spent decades dealing with in-fighting and corruption, this is the most concrete accountability step yet. It puts the burden of delivery squarely on the people running the federation.

The operational stakes are real. If ASA does not act, the national federation faces suspension, a consequence that would land hardest not on the administrators but on the athletes, coaches, volunteers, technical officials, event organisers and administrators who keep the sport functioning on the ground. Sports minister Gayton McKenzie appears to understand this. He urged parliament not to suspend ASA, a move that would have hurt the sport and the athletes, and he reportedly pushed World Athletics to take action against the national body. Whatever else may be said of McKenzie, that intervention was aimed at keeping the machinery of the sport running.

Parliament, by contrast, has been part of the problem. The Portfolio Committee on Sport has been relatively useless in addressing ongoing issues, and if the committee had its way, the ASA board would have been dissolved, with no apparent concern for the very real consequence of the federation being suspended for government interference. The reality is that the portfolio committee has no real understanding of the rules of local or international sport. A dissolved board and a suspended federation would have meant no functioning governing structure at all, leaving the sport without anyone to deliver competitions, selection or support.

Even if Moloi is removed, as World Athletics has essentially demanded, the governance questions do not end there. ASA vice-president John Mathane is also facing allegations after allegedly requesting that his costs be covered to attend the World Athletics U20 Championships without approval from the board, despite ASA not being able to cover the costs of athletes. That detail matters from a delivery standpoint. A federation that cannot fund its competitors was apparently being asked to fund an official’s travel. It is exactly the kind of gap between resources and priorities that World Athletics is trying to close through its constitutional overhaul demand.

The wider context makes the intervention more understandable. South African Olympic sport is in a difficult state, with multiple codes facing a variety of concerns. Beyond athletics, swimming and karate are dealing with their own issues, and the SA Sports Confederation and Olympic Committee is dealing with concerns of its own, with president Barry Hendricks currently suspended for potentially breaching the organisation’s governance protocols. When national structures struggle to govern themselves, oversight from international bodies becomes one of the few reliable levers for accountability.

That is the core of the case here. South African athletics has a tremendous amount of potential; it just needs to be tidied up. If local governing bodies and parliament cannot control themselves or make useful decisions, it is a relief that international bodies are at least making an effort. World Athletics is being proactive in attempting to ensure ASA resolves its ongoing controversies, and global oversight may be what enforces the accountability that domestic structures have failed to deliver.

For every individual facing controversy in South African athletics, there are a thousand athletes, coaches, volunteers, technical officials, event organisers and administrators working hard to keep the sport on a straight and narrow path to recovery. For the sake of each of them, the hope now is that World Athletics can crack the whip and clean things up, so that the sport’s delivery on the field finally matches the effort of the people who make it happen.