Mandla Ntlanganiso has painted a very bad picture of the affairs of Boxing South Africa (BSA) he discovered when he returned to the penniless fistic sport regulatory body from suspension in December last year.
Speaking during an interview with TKO Boxing Magazine show on SABC 2, Ntlanganiso revealed that he found the boxing regulator’s kitty empty and that resulted in him together with his management team begging the Department of Sport, Arts and Culture to bail them out.
Failure to get a bail out from the Department of Sport would have resulted in BSA employees going home empty handed at the end of the last three months of the 2023/24 financial year.
“When I got back to the office on the 13th of December last year, I had to check the pulse of the organisation, what had been happening since my exile in August. I found out that there’s a lot of things that were happening, particularly the issue of finances. And I was shocked to find out that the institution at the time was operating on a minus,” Ntlanganiso said on TKO Boxing Magazine show.
“A lot of activities and payments that were supposed to be done were behind. That’s the first analysis I looked at so that I could see what interventions could be done. Even in Jan, there were some challenges even in paying salaries. However, we sat down with the management team, we crafted a submission request to the department to assist us so that we were able to finish the financial year, that is from January to March.”
Despite Ntlanganiso and his management team trying to rescue the situation, they didn’t get the full amount of money they requested from the Department of Sport. However, the show goes on as BSA is still operational.
“Even though we didn’t get the actual amount that we looked at so that we could cover all the outstanding issues, at least, the compensation of employees was sorted and other issues that needed urgency,” he said.
Meanwhile, Ntlanganiso is hoping that the boxing regulatory regulatory body would be rescued through good governance or else they would be forced to go cap in hand and beg the Department of Sport for a future bail out.
“The first thing we need to do is to go back to basics. Administrative functions of the sport are very key, we must be on top. Issues of governance, we need not be found wanting there. All governance related functions must be adhered to because we are a public entity,” Ntlanganiso concluded.
