Last Friday, 6th December, the Cricket West Indies (CWI) board was scheduled to meet in Antigua. However, the meeting never took place due to the lack of quorum, as the Barbados Cricket Association (BCA) and the Guyana Cricket Board (GCB) opted to boycott the occasion, marking another sad day in the never-ending saga of the plummet of West Indies cricket.
One of the items on the agenda was the vote to implement recommendations from the Wehby Report, a governance review of the operations of CWI, commissioned by the Ricky Skerritt Administration, which came to office following the ousting of Dave Cameron at the 2019 elections. It is important to place the Wehby Report in the proper context of time. When it landed on the desks of CWI back in August, 2020, it was the fifth management review presented to the regional institution in seventeen years. Firstly, there was the Lucky Report (2003) which reviewed the negotiations between Cable and Wireless, the then major sponsor of West Indies Cricket, and the WICB (the predecessor of CWI), and the decision which led to the telecommunication giant being replaced by its arch rival Digicel. After the Board’s inept response to the findings of the three-member committee, Justice Anthony Lucky, then serving as a member of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, resigned from the WICB where he was chair of the Code of Conduct and Disciplinary Committee, as the WICB chose “to criticize the [Committee’s] findings in a self-serving manner,” rather than meet with it.
It was the start of a pattern of deflections which the WICB would thrice replicate over the next thirteen years. As each new governance review proposing changes to the archaic structure of the WICB was presented, the members of the Board would dismiss them in a most contemptuous manner. A year after the 139-page Patterson Report (2007) was submitted, the Patterson Committee, in a four-page letter, inquired as to why the region had been kept in the dark as to the WICB’s deliberations and the fate of the report. The Committee was duly informed that it had failed to deal with the many challenges facing the game in the region.
The Charles Wilkin Report (2012), ironically, once again commissioned by the WICB, to review its governance structure, and the Barriteau Report (2015) were summarily dismissed by the arrogant members, and joined their predecessors on the shelf gathering dust, the latter, an exhaustive review, which was quite damning of the WICB’s “anachronistic, antiquated and obsolete” governance structure and called for its immediate dissolution and replacement by an interim management committee. It noted that, “These two key measures are absolutely necessary in order to transform and modernize the governance, management, administration and the playing of the game.”
The 36-page Wehby Report essentially recommended that the CWI undertake “comprehensive reform”. Among the many suggestions were the reduction of the size of the board, greater background in gender and skill set composition, and cutting the number of committees from twelve to five. These sentiments were merely echoes of the Patterson and Wilkin reports.
The release of the Wehby Report generated an immediate irate response from Conde Riley, the BCA President, who declared that his governing body was going to put together a “high-powered committee” to perform “urgent surgery” on the Wehby proposals. His knee-jerk rant only confirmed St. Kitts-Nevis Queen’s Counsel, Charles Wilkin’s observation from a decade ago that the WICBC directors “wanted to preserve at all costs all of their positions on the board.”
Fast forward to last Friday, and we see that the status quo remains unchanged. This time around, the Guyana Cricket Board (GCB) has hitched its wagon to the BCA, still led by Conde Riley, who appears hell bent on opposing any change which threatens his hold on the power he retains under the current structure, regardless of the detriment to the future of West Indies cricket. The two boards issued a joint five-point statement, in which they stated their opposition to the perceived aim to diminish the autonomy of the territorial boards and expressed frustration at being sidelined in the decision-making process. The two boards highlighted the lack of a response to their previous proposals, including a rotational leadership model and a long-term development strategy aimed at reducing infighting and nepotism in the election of CWI executives.
Wading through the fluff of the dissenting boards’ statement, their true grievances can discerned in the third and fourth points: “3. The BCA and GCB rejected the Wehby Report on the basis that it seeks to relinquish power from the territorial boards and is further seen given recent decisions at CWI. The repetitive meetings under the guise of corporate governance reform attempt to bring parts of said Wehby Report which were previously rejected. 4. In recent years, the Secretariat of the Company has on occasions, either forgotten or ignored or failed to acknowledge the historical status of and the contribution made by its Full Members. Without want of curtailing zeal beyond boundaries, such habitual culture must reverse in the interest of progress.” It’s all about control and power.
Unfortunately, the governance of the game in the West Indies has now arrived at an unprecedented impasse between the various territorial boards. The BCA and the GCB have decided that aligning operations of the CWI with the international standards are not as important as their demands for greater respect for their autonomy and historical contributions. Their counter proposals for rotational leadership and a long-term development plan reflect a contrasting vision for the future of West Indies cricket, and appear to be more in tune with fragile personal egos and clinging to the reins of power. CWI President Dr Kishore Shallow’s pleas for urgency of governance reform as essential for the growth and sustainability of cricket in the Caribbean have fallen on deaf ears in some quarters.
