LAHORE: Former chairman Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) Najam Sethi and ex-members of the Board of Governors of the PCB Nouman Butt and Shakil Sheikh and others have slammed the decision of the PCB of handing over the management of provincial cricket associations to the Deputy Commissioners.
In a tweet message Najam Sethi said: “PCB has handed over the management of provincial cricket associations to the DCs. The bureaucracy cannot run cricket. It has already destroyed other sports in the country. Such disastrous decisions should be reversed and policy makers taken to task!’.
Ex-member BoG Nouman has also raised his voice against the decision which was interestingly taken by the Chief Secretary Punjab on the recommendation of newly-appointed chairman of the newly formed Central Punjab Cricket Association, Abdullah Sumbal, who is also a high-ranked serving government official.
“Our bureaucracy is already running the Sports Board Punjab and everyone knows what the contribution of the bureaucrats is and how they have destroyed other games and now cricket is also being handed over to the baboobs to further ruin it,” Nouman said.
He lamented that everything bad was done by the incumbent body of the PCB under the nose of patron-in-chief PCB, Prime Minister Imran Khan. “I can’t believe that the Prime Minister is unaware of all these dirty actions of the PCB management which is drawing record high salaries but doing nothing,” he said.
Nouman added that recently a female Director Human Resource PCB has been hired on a hefty salary which has further burdened the Board’s coffers. “Since taking charge, PCB chairman Ehsan Mani has shown this practice of first hiring a person for a post and then giving an ad for that post which suits that hired person,” he pointed out.
Meanwhile, Sethi also raised his concern over the huge perks and benefits of the PCB management and demanded the salaries of all the highly ranked officials be uploaded on the PCB official website so that everyone could compare it with what his (Sethi’s) management was drawing and what is going on today.
“Will PCB put up a table on its website detailing salaries and perks of CEO, CFO, COO and Directors, Consultants and GMs now compared to 2018 under previous management?” Sethi asked in a tweet.
Another ex-member of the Board of Governors, Shakil Sheikh also raised a similar question in a tweet, “Why does PCB need such a highly salaried HR Director when there are no big HR issues and a manager at one tenth cost has done a good job for two decades?”
It may be mentioned here that the PCB wasted almost 16 months in announcing the interim bodies of six provincial cricket associations in the first week of March this year, under its newly adopted constitution of 2019. So far these provincial cricket associations, which are formed for just one year to hold the elections at the city levels, could not hold a single meeting while the first three months out of one year have already passed.
Meanwhile, with reference to the concerns expressed by Najam Sethi and other ex-BoG officials, PCB said that the Central Punjab Cricket Association has only asked for the assistance of the Commissioners to facilitate it in holding the matches and conducting the elections of all the cities of the association which will be due after the completion of the club cricket registration by June 21.
The PCB further says that the head of the Central Punjab has suggested to the chief secretary Punjab to hand over all the cricket grounds to it or to facilitate it for conducting matches.
The PCB further clarified that it was not an overall decision of the Board as five other cricket associations namely Sindh, Balochistan, Southern Punjab, KP and Northern had not asked for such assistance.
