How They Captured Comrades

Board members are elected by votes cast at the AGM. All Comrades Marathon Association (CMA) members in good standing are allowed to attend and vote for Board members at the AGM. The annual membership fee in 2023 was R50. This was raised to R100 in 2024 along with the updated eligibility requirement on the Comrades website to be, “either a Comrades Runner or Comrades Volunteer before applying for CMA membership”.

The official reason for doubling the CMA Membership fee was ‘to cover increased administration costs and member benefits’ but unofficially it is also understood to be an apparent attempt to make the buying of AGM votes more difficult. In 2023 it cost an estimated R6500 to capture Comrades (130 CMA memberships x R50). If the same game plan is followed in 2024, the cost is R13000 – still a bargain for the unscrupulous to extend their malevolent influence on the largest and richest ultra marathon in the world.

When the last Comrades AGM was held in November 2023, there were approximately 450 paid up members in good standing. However, you must attend the AGM in person which precludes anyone outside KwaZulu Natal attending without incurring great cost and inconvenience (in 2023 there were just 3 out-of-town attendees despite a large portion of the CMA membership being from outside of KZN). The inability to attend online would also result in lower attendance from Durban runners and volunteers, especially with the N3 roadworks making the ‘Up run’ to Pietermaritzburg an arduous outing. About a third, just 156 voting members, were recorded as in attendance at the 2023 AGM.

We’ll get into details about the “community marshals” in a later article but for now it’s important to note that there are two groups of community marshals who have designated ‘leaders’ – who I will call Mr. X from the Inchanga Valley and Mr. Y from Mpumalanga (not the province but a township on the opposite side of Cato Ridge on the back road to Hammarsdale). The Community Marshals Portfolio sits under Board member Isaac Ngwenya (who will feature prominently in the upcoming articles).

According to well-placed sources, Mr. X arrives at Comrades House every June with enough cash for 80 to 100 CMA memberships and a slightly more frugal Mr. Y with the cash for 50 CMA memberships. No identification numbers, phone numbers, addresses or other details are provided for the memberships*. In fact, this year Mr. X just arrived at reception with R8,000 cash, dropped the money and said, “This is for the usual.”

* It is a minimum requirement that all members complete a membership form (which from 2024 has been an online form).  Previously, this is never done by the community marshals in contravention of CMA’s own procedures.

Sadly, unemployment is a reality for the vast majority of our population. Those struggling to find regular income will scrutinise their expenses. They certainly cannot afford luxuries and frivolous payments. It’s unlikely that anyone from an impoverished community would willingly spend R100 of the R180 that they earn for being a race day community marshal on an annual CMA membership. And yet, this is exactly what supposedly happens.

“It is noteworthy that the community marshals come from very impoverished communities, and difficult to comprehend that at the beginning of June each year each of these individuals supposedly receives an envelope with R180 in it, to ‘volunteer” as a community marshal on race day, and then a few weeks later the same impoverished individual pays back to CMA R100 of the R180 in order to be a member of CMA for which there are absolutely no material benefits, other than a bus ride to Pietermaritzburg in November and a free meal at the AGM.”

From a Concerned Comrades Insider

For the 2024 event, Comrades paid for 210 community marshals and somewhere between 30 and 120 reported for duty on race day. According to the person who provided the highest estimate, “It’s very difficult to quantify how many community marshals are actually there as they don’t all wear volunteer branded T-shirts or bibs and carry flags. I counted 121 this year* but some of those could be there to have a chat with their friends. Age-wise, they’re all late teens/early twenties with some certainly under 18.” The CMA’s procurement procedures forbids employing under 18s.

* This is an all-inclusive figure for ‘possible’ community marshals with no clothing or flags to identify them as such. All the other estimates provided were that 50 or fewer community marshals were present on race day.

Although there’s a very low turnout of community marshals at the pre-race briefings (even with the enticement of free food and drink) and on race day, this group of individuals appear to be the most devout CMA members.

Come AGM evening in November, a large number of community marshals are bussed to Pietermaritzburg and given a list of names telling them who to vote for at the AGM. According to eyewitnesses at the last AGM, the bussed in voters were totally disinterested in proceedings, had no idea what was going on, had slips of paper telling them who to vote for (as in, who should be elected as Board members) and were just waiting for the free food.

The bussing in and buying of votes is not a recent development. According to one source, “I haven’t missed an AGM for ages and every year have witnessed the bussed in community marshals arriving for ‘drinks & supper’ on the house.” Another source within the Comrades structures specifically names 2016 as the first year in which the bulk buying of CMA memberships and bussing in of voters began. A third source who was at the 2016 AGM recalled that it was, “a fiasco of an AGM when busses of people who had no interest in Comrades were there and the meeting lasted till well past midnight. Their only purpose was to vote for certain members of the board. “

A CMA membership committee document acknowledges, “ever since then [2016] our community marshals have prevailed as the most powerful voting block within Comrades.” When an audit was done on CMA memberships in 2022 it was revealed that 242 of the 345 members do not belong to an athletic club.

I managed to get the exact CMA membership figures from 2014 to 2023 which are provided in the table below. There was a 100% jump in memberships in 2016 when the bulk payments for community marshal CMA memberships began at a cost of R25 per member. Conjecture is that the subsequent massive 250% increase to 842 members in 2017 was an attempt at some countermeasures as well as others hopping on the ‘buy my seat bandwagon’. One Board member reportedly spent R7,000 on memberships (which were R30 in 2017) to secure his election.

Who was the chairperson of the Comrades Membership Committee during this period? Isaac Ngwenya. Who was (and still is) the head of the Community Marshals Portfolio? Isaac Ngwenya. How was membership managed by Ngwenya during his tenure at the top of the Membership Committee? Here’s a direct quote from someone who was integrally involved, “There was a complete lack of governance (and capacity). It was absolute chaos. Mr. X and Mr. Y would apparently just rock up to the office and make bulk payments with a list of names (not even necessarily a complete list) and were even permitted to later delete and substitute new names. There were dozens of ‘members’ for whom CMA did not have any contact details, identity numbers, addresses, etc.”

The chair of the Membership Committee has recently been reassigned to former Comrades Chairperson Cheryl Winn. Whilst Winn was reluctant to speak about previous Membership Committee chairs, she did admit that the list of names has been “steadily cleaned up” and a more rigorous process for the vetting of new applications has been put in place: “Every membership fee MUST now be accompanied with a fully completed membership application. Membership is open to Comrades runners and volunteers.  Runners are verified against the runners’ database.  And volunteers must be vouched for by their respective committee chairperson or portfolio holder.”

The last line is important because it still offers a loophole as Isaac Ngwenya heads up the Community Marshals Portfolio. As we will see in a future article, there is zero governance within the Community Marshals portfolio so Ngwenya can pretty much ‘vouch’ for whomever he likes.

Remember our diligent marshal counter earlier in this article who spotted 121 potential community marshals standing along the route and noted how young they were. This is contrary to the demographics of the community marshals who arrive at the AGM for a festival of food and vote rigging: “The bussed in community marshals are not the youngsters who are out there on race day. They’re definitely people in their 30s, 40s, 50s and older. They have been bussed in for at least the last eight live AGM meetings. They make it very obvious that they’re there for the food and drink. They have been overheard agitating why is the meeting taking so long because they’re hungry and thirsty.”

Although the new membership process has been tightened up, there has been no effort to validate pre-existing members. Unofficially, it is understood that this is due to fears of being labelled racist should the CMA membership committee start scrutinising the credentials of community marshals on the membership database. As explained herein, it would also not suit at least four members of the Board for the validity of these memberships to be investigated.

It also looks like more diligence is needed to verify that those arriving at the AGM match the person in the membership database. Explained one member, “If I want to vote, I need to provide my ID for checking against the membership schedule. I don’t know how the alleged community marshals make it work for them as opposed to members like me but they regularly eat my share of supper by the time I get to the tables and those times I go home hungry whilst they get bussed home with a goodie bag of my food and my unused share of the allocated per person drinks.”

It seems to me that by making the next AGM a food and drink free zone would be a simple and effective way of making sure that those attending the AGM are actually there because they are interested in the future of Comrades. I do not have official figures but, based on best estimates, it would seem that there will be a record high of over 1200 CMA members ahead of the next November 2024 AGM so removing food and drink from the menu would save Comrades a significant amount of money.

Official figures from informed sources suggest that there were 875 new membership applications ratified at a Comrades Board meeting on 31 July. The majority of these are Comrades runners who can easily be validated but processing has taken months. However, it is also understood that a ‘R10,000 investment’ has been made in an additional 100 new community marshals as CMA members as part of this latest membership approval.

I have been given suggestions that the Board (or certain members of the Board) deliberately dragged their feet in ratifying the new applications in an attempt to prevent the new members having a say at the Special General Meeting (SGM) which is scheduled for 15 August. The recent draconian (and probably illegal) decree from KZNA that the CMA can only accept local provincial memberships adds credence to this perception:

READ MORE: KZNA says “No More” to upcountry CMA Memberships

ASIDE: Attorney Mark Leathers, Director at Mc Naught & Co, explained that the KZNA decree is definitely illegal. Leathers represented Alexandra Morozova against the CMA and Athletics South Africa (ASA) in 2022.

The CMA / ASA tried to stop the Russian athlete from participating in the 2022 event (which Morozova eventually won), arguing that they were applying a World Athletics request to ASA. However,  the Pietermaritzburg High Court accepted that the World Athletics request would never have been binding on the CMA, even if it were a directive, because the CMA has has never legally fallen under the authority of ASA. KZNA is a derivative of ASA. Therefore, there is a High Court precedent that the CMA is legally independent from ASA and, by extension, KZNA.

The following four Board members are named (confirmed by a number of sources within the CMA structures) as having allegedly benefitted from these bussed-in and bought votes: Celi Makhoba, Isaac Ngwenya, Phumlani Ntuli and Zinhle Sokhela.

The despicable and repeated racist actions of Zinhle Sokhela have been covered here and here, the long history of controversy and maladministration at the hands of Celi Makhoba is detailed here. There is enough compromising evidence around Isaac Ngwenya to warrant its own spinoff miniseries. This will be covered in future articles as will the manner in which Phumlani Ntuli used his role as the head of the HR Committee to constructively manoeuvre Ashworth out of the organisation and shield staff members involved in outright sabotage from disciplinary action.

In a response to questions sent, Ntuli distanced himself from the other implicated Board members (and Ngwenya specifically), “My work with Mr. Isaac Ngwenya is limited to Board and HR&R committee meetings.” Ntuli further denies that his election to the Board is as a result of the community marshals, “My board seat has never been paid for. After serving in various committees for several years, I was approached by a previous board chair to accept nomination to the board which I accepted and I was elected. In the process I have encouraged my friends to join CMA as a member… Such members have come from my club, family and friends”.

Afterword: How to stop this?

Apart from the simple and obvious approach of applying proper diligence to new membership applications (which seems to be in place for recent applications), existing ‘non-runner’ memberships should be re-evaluated (as requested in a motion to be tabled at the SGM).

Currently, only in person attendance is allowed at the AGM which does not make sense in the 21^st century. About 45% of the Comrades entrants come from Gauteng alone (and just 20% from KwaZulu Natal). The request for more inclusivity for non-KZN members was raised by one of the few out-of-town attendees at the last AGM, Brenda Marolen, but nothing further seems to have been done by the Board to be more inclusive. The simple solution is that the CMA constitution needs to be changed and a SGM has been called (by members, not the Board) to vote on allowing remote attendance and voting.

Since its inception, the Board has never actively promoted CMA membership. If I am an incumbent Board member, having a large number of new members threatens my re-election and I am therefore disincentivised to actively encourage new joiners. The influx of new membership applications explains the panicked and racist WhatsApp message by the compromised Board member Zinhle Sokhela, the additional R10,000 investment in new community marshal members and the KZNA’s attempts to block out-of-province CMA membership.

If the Comrades entry fee automatically included CMA membership for the following year, this would make the buying of “volunteer votes” impractical with the added benefit of placing the future of Comrades in the hands of those with the biggest vested interest in ensuring its success – that of the active Comrades runner.

A final point is that there is very little benefit in joining the CMA (other than being able to attend and vote at the AGM). During the course of her short tenure, Ashworth proposed that CMA members get a “fast queue” for race pack collection, a discount on entry fees and maybe some free Comrades gear. This proposal was never seriously considered by the Board.

Cover photo courtesy Comrades Marathon Association

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