Sports structures in the Eastern Cape could find themselves in a dark place and struggling for resources to operate in full flow.
The provincial department of sports, recreation, arts and culture has held back the Eastern Cape Sports Confederation’s funding for the 2024/2025 financial year due to the sports body’s failure to submit financial statements for the previous year.
This was disclosed in a leaked letter to the Dispatch signed by the Eastern Cape sports department’s acting general manager, Awethu Zumana.
“This correspondence serves to kindly ... inform and confirm that [the department] has not been able to transfer the [gazetted] funds by government to the Eastern Cape Sports Confederation for the current financial year,” Zumana said in the letter.
“The main reason for the situation is because of the failure by Eastern Cape Sports Confederation to submit all the required documents, one of them being the financial statements/report as compliance; this has then necessitated [the department] not to transfer the annual budgeted allocation through the transfer payment to [the confederation].
“A series of meetings [has] been convened and unfortunately yielded no breakthrough towards our office affecting the transfer payment process as a compliant.
“Our office is inundated with correspondence from various federations seeking assistance towards participation at national participation and the response they receive from [the confederation] is that [the department] has not given them funds without the full explanation of what is the root cause of which it is only the one mentioned herein above [sic].
“Our office hopes and believes that this correspondence will clear the uncertainty and as such [is] very concerned with the status quo and is [on a] quest to try to resolve the matter amicably within the financial prescripts of the [Public Finance Management Act],” the letter concluded.
Top department officials confirmed to the Dispatch that it had not issued funds to the confederation for the coming calendar year and called for it to be “accountable for [its] actions”.
The confederation is in charge of distributing funds for the various federations across all districts in the province, and for sports development.
When contacted on Monday by the Dispatch, confederation president Mzondeleli Qototyi declined to comment on why it had not submitted the necessary financial documents.
A confederation insider said some employees had not received their salaries since February.
“It has been three months now that we have been not paid. When we approach the management, they don’t give a proper explanation,” the source said.
News of the funding impasse broke after reports that Border and Eastern Province rugby clubs were up in arms about the prize money for the 2024 edition of the marquee Eastern Cape Super 14, which ended in March, remaining unpaid.
It is understood the budget for the 2024 competition, of which the confederation is the custodian, stood at R1.069m.
Though the department had reportedly processed the funds, the Dispatch reported last week that the clubs were still owed 70% of the proceeds from the 2023 tournament.
Despite having been promised that they would be paid the outstanding 70% before the conclusion of this year’s edition, the clubs said this had not happened.
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