“Management at all levels has degenerated into an ongoing story of incompetence, internal wrangling and court cases. The more they have grown, with escalating, fully professional personnel, the more the problems mount.”
It has become a habitual question that continues to defy an acceptable answer.
The West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) has twice commissioned reports to recommend changes to its governance; each time it ignored their main points.
In the meantime, the game in the region has gone into such a state of decline that the team that dominated the world for 15 years now languishes near the bottom of the International Cricket Council (ICC) rankings; simultaneously, the WICB is teetering on the brink of bankruptcy.
The former Jamaican prime minister, P.J. Patterson, who headed the committee that prepared the first document in 2007, complained that he and his two other committee members had wasted two years of their lives working on the assignment.
Five years later, Queen’s Counsel Charles Wilkin of St. Kitts & Nevis, at one time a left-arm spinner for Cambridge University and the Leeward Islands, heatedly quit as head of the governance committee after the WICB directors “refused to make any change at all to the current structure.” He charged that the incumbents “wanted to preserve at all costs all of their positions on the board.”
As it was since its formation in 1927, the WICB still comprises two directors from each of its regional members, now six in all, who elect the president and vice-president.
Patterson and Wilkin both proposed profound changes, among them a reduction in the number of directors.
In addition, Patterson put forward the introduction of additional representatives from the Caribbean Community governments, the private sector, tourism and the University of the West Indies (UWI); Wilkin pressed for a nominations committee “to identify and recommend persons with appropriate skills and experience to serve as elected directors.”
The issue is now being revisited by a committee appointed by the regional Caribbean Community
