Jamaica Gleaner Editorial

We note last week’s announcement by Cricket West Indies (CWI) of its appointment of Chris Dehring as its CEO, who it expects to “steer CWI into a bold new chapter of growth and development”.

This newspaper has no doubt that Mr Dehring, who has an impressive record as an entrepreneur and business executive, possesses the technical competence to successfully lead CWI as a corporate entity, with a healthy balance sheet.

Indeed, Mr Dehring, a Jamaican, was one of the founders of a very successful merchant bank, Dehring Bunting and Golding, before it was spun off to the big Canadian financial group, Bank of Nova Scotia. He is also a founder of the regional sports television channel Sportsmax, and has invested in other digital media ventures, as well as telecommunications systems.

Chris Dehring also knows more than a thing or two not only about cricket, but sports generally, as well as the marketing thereof.

At cricket, he was a talented player at the schoolboy level, representing Jamaica in the regional under-19 tournament, and featured in the island’s senior domestic competition. But it was not only cricket. Mr Dehring went to university in the United States on a football scholarship.

Neither is he a stranger to CWI. In the late 1990s, he was seconded to the organisation as its chief marketing officer and was one of the principal negotiators in the West Indies’ successful bid to host the 2007 Cricket World Cup. He then became the CEO of the company that ran the World Cup.

NEED MORE THAN THAT

Experience and a great résumé obviously count. But CWI will need more than Mr Dehring’s sporting and corporate talents to ensure a sustainable resurrection of West Indies cricket, rather than mistaking every new spasm by the regional team to be an awakening of Lazarus.

The point is, the crisis faced by West Indies cricket since the regional team’s decade-and-a-half dominance ended in the mid-1990s does not reside in any failure by CWI’s succession of hired corporate managers over the period. Rather, it is embedded in the anachronistic, philosophical foundation and myopic leadership upon which the regional game rests; one that presumes that what, by broad acknowledgement, is a public good, should continue to be managed by private, unaccountable interests, some of whose interventionist bosses remain resistant to transparency or to share ownership/power with all stakeholders.

Indeed, it is these tensions that are at the centre of the current contretemps between factions of the owners of CWI, the territorial boards, over the implementation of the Wehby Report – a set of proposals for the restructuring of CWI.

The recommendations were authored by a task force that was chaired by the Jamaican business leader Don Wehby. They were delivered more than four years ago, in 2020.

Mr Wehby’s document, however, was only the latest in a string of reviews of the structure of West Indies cricket over the past quarter-century. Perhaps the most consequential of these was the one delivered in 2007 by a panel chaired by the former Jamaican prime minister, P.J. Patterson.

In 2015 a review, commissioned by the Caribbean Community and carried out by a group chaired by the former University of the West Indies professor in public policy, Eudine Barriteau, in noting the failure of CWI to implement various recommendations for reform by Patterson and the Charles Wilkins Report (2012), plus others, “strongly recommend(ed) the immediate dissolution of the West Indies Cricket Board and the appointment of an interim Board whose structure and composition will be radically different from the now-proven, obsolete governance framework”. The Barriteau Report felt that the recommendations by the Patterson and Wilson task forces provided frameworks that should be built on.

SLIMMED-DOWN BOARD

In essence, Wehby built on the findings of his predecessors, calling for a slimmed-down board, including halving representation by the territorial boards from a dozen to six. Another six members would be nominated by designated search committee, and voted on at CWI’s AGM. Eventually, though, the number of board positions would be reduced to nine.

The Wehby Report also called for a slashing of the number of committees run by CWI; proposed more subject-related subcommittees of the restructured board; and, like Patterson, called for a stakeholder engagement body, which would meet periodically with CWI. The role of that group would be more advisory and discussive, but, it appears, without policy authority.

CWI members were to meet earlier this month to vote on implementing elements of the Wehby Report, some of which some territorial boards had already agreed to. But the representatives of the Barbados Cricket Association (BCA) and the Guyana Cricket Board (GCB) did not turn up, denying the meeting a quorum.

The specific texts of the resolutions that were to be on the agenda have not been published. However, the BCA and GCB said in a joint statement that the proposals lacked clarity on how they would “benefit the company in consideration of its multiple stakeholder base”.

They added: “The BCA and GCB rejected the Wehby Report on the basis that it seeks to relinquish power from the territorial boards … The repetitive meetings under the guise of corporate governance reform attempt to bring parts of said Wehby Report which were previously rejected”.

If by all acknowledgement West Indies cricket is a public good, it should, in this newspaper’s view, be subject to administrative law. Perhaps a consortium of regional stakeholders should seek judicial review in a regional court, asking the court to issue orders for the CWI to implement the recommendations it commissioned, or, as Professor Barriteau recommended, disband itself.