Holomisa lashes sporting bosses

The South African Government has failed dismally at delivering sports development in townships and rural areas, United Democratic Movement leader Bantu Holomisa said on Friday in Uitenhage.

"Sporting codes need to be focusing on developing and nurturing talent throughout the country...instead, the current approach is haphazard and piecemeal.

Many communities have no facilities whilst the few existing facilities stand empty and are vandalised because there is no real development effort underway to nurture the players that could use those facilities," Holomisa said.

He was addressing participants at the Butityi Nkonki's School Rugby Tournament in the Eastern Cape.

Holomisa criticised the government, particularly the department of sport for "talking loudly about transformation" but failing to deliver or do anything about it.

"The Department of Sport must be revamped in its entirety...There is a bad habit developing among the authorities of always referring to race when we discuss taking forward sport, especially rugby," he said. "But when you ask them on the strategies and the budgets to affect sport transformation, they just poke their noses and can't provide a straight answer."

He also accused sporting authorities for focusing their attention on sporting codes, instead of building talent at grass roots level.

"This is becoming a norm of the present government to target successful institutions by denigrating them instead of focusing on failing institutions...now they are targeting the Springbok whereas one would have expected them to focus their attention on why South Africa failed in Beijing recently," Holomisa said.