JUST IN: Bosso constitution-making was no walk in the park

Ngqwele Dube, Sports Correspondent

A member of the Highlanders Constitutional Review Committee, Innocent Batsani Ncube strongly believes that lack of proper coordination stalled the process, making it a long drawn out affair.

Highlanders finally presented a draft constitution to members at the annual general meeting held at its Sports Club last Sunday with a resolution passed that submissions should be made by 15 March and a meeting being called at the end of March to deliberate on the recommendations ahead of the July mid-season review meeting.

Cosmas Sikhosana, Elkanah Dube, Donald Ndebele, Davies Sibanda, Ncube, Andrew Tapela, Nhlanhla Dube and Daniel Molokele were chosen to lead the club in reviewing the club’s constitution to ensure it falls in line the Fifa’s Club Licensing regulations and as part of a renewal process for the club.

Ncube said he took it upon himself to begin drafting the constitution as there seemed to be lack of will among members of the committee to take the first step. He said while delays to the finalisation of the draft have been apportioned to board members, as the structure will be abolished, it was mainly lack of coordination that hampered them.

“We struggled to meet as a committee because there would be excuses from other members leading to cancellation of meetings while on one occasion the executive had promised to organise a retreat for the team to enable us to work uninterrupted but nothing came of it. From my experience, I feel the stalling came from executive members with vested interests and who felt threatened by the adoption of a new constitution,” said Ncube.

He said board members did not interfere with the process, lobby them nor seek to influence it or push the committee towards a certain direction. Ncube, who is studying at the University of London is currently in the United Kingdom , said there was too much talk but no tangible document to work with hence he decided to sit down and draft the constitution after last year’s mid-year annual general meeting.

“I took up the initiative to draft it as I intended to create a draft that would get us talking because it is better to discuss how to improve something rather than nothing and in the process I received active and constant encouragement from our chairperson Elkanah Dube. There seemed to be no appetite from members to draft it from scratch and I realised time was moving but there was still no document to talk about,” he said.

One of the main elements of the new constitution is the abolition of the board of directors, which will be replaced by a Heritage and Legacy Council while maintaining an expanded executive that would have six members. The charter also calls for the recognition of conventional branch-based members, something that could result in the increase of club membership and also allows the executive to come up with other classes of membership “to cater for various categories of members and such members shall enjoy varying rights and have varying obligations”.

Creating different classes of members will allow the club to levy different amounts for different members unlike in the current scenario where there is only life and ordinary membership that offer little or no benefits besides attending AGMs and entitling one to vote for club leadership.

@rasthembo