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Blue Bulls days numbered?

Neels Jackson - Beeld

Pretoria – The newly-established Tshwane Sports Council is considering doing away with the Barberton daisy as the region’s traditional sporting symbol.

Five proposals – all incorporating the colours white, black, yellow and green – have already been tabled. It is on the cards for all representative sports teams in Pretoria.

Traditionally, Pretoria-based teams wear light blue with the Barberton daisy as their emblem.

Herman Bester of the Gauteng North Angling Association said that politicians had already decided to give the daisy the bullet.

He refers to minutes of the Tshwane Sports Council that provide five examples of a new logo that have already been tabled and of the Tshwane colours of white, black, yellow and green (almost identical to the ANC’s black, yellow and green).

Kallie Kriel of Afriforum has said that they are willing to take the matter to court on behalf of angling or “any other sporting code that would like to”.

The changes are among the possibilities that exist in the process where the newly-established Tshwane Sports Council are reconsidering emblems and colours that representative sports teams from Pretoria will wear.

Tshwane Sports Council chairperson Bismarck Mosuoe said that no decision had been taken. According to him the sports bodies had been asked for proposals and a decision will be taken at a special general meeting of the Tshwane Sports Council in April.

All sporting codes will be tied to that decision.

Beeld asked whether the Blue Bulls’ colours would also be in the firing line, and he answered that it is “the implication”.

However, he emphasised that the meeting had to take a decision.

“If they want the daisy, they will have it. If they want a zebra, they will have it.”

Blue Bulls president Boet Fick said: “It won’t happen.” He added that the Blue Bulls emblem had been registered.

Bester and Afriforum also expressed serious reservations about how the Tshwane Sports Council had been established and is functioning.

It is a structure under the Gauteng Sports Council and forms part of the new sporting structure that Government wants to establish in South Africa.

Gauteng and Tshwane’s sports councils and constitutions are apparently not in order and there was not much consultation with interested parties.

Bester denies that sports bodies had been consulted.

The establishment of the Tshwane Sports Council will apparently lead to the phasing out of the Gauteng North Sports Council to which 84 sporting codes are affiliated.

Bester said that only four sporting codes had attended the first meeting at which the Tshwane Sports Council had been created, and at the second meeting there were only eight.

The Tshwane Sports Council further consists of representatives from local sports councils from different parts of the Tshwane metropole.

Should all 84 sporting codes join the Tshwane Sports Council, they would have a lot more votes than the local sporting councils.

However, Kriel says he has seen an e-mail in which it is proposed that the local council’s votes should carry just as much weight as all the sporting codes put together. This is said to be “in the interests of transformation”.

The Tshwane Sports Council will meet again on Wednesday evening.
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