Listen here.Brett Redelinghuys was banned for ten years by Swimming South Africa for trying to fix it from the inside. This week, the two men who banned him, president Alan Fritz and CEO Shaun Adriaanse, were provisionally suspended by World Aquatics itself, over allegations of abuse of power and fake documents. In between: a R111 million high-performance swimming centre in Franschhoek that has never held a swimmer, its pools filled with stagnant water instead, a school stripped of the facilities it signed away, and a breakaway water polo body formed because, in Redelinghuys's words, there was no way to fix this from within. He lays out what he says actually happened to the money, why South Africa's water polo team walked away from the 2024 Olympics without most of the country knowing, and what he thinks needs to happen next..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox every morning on weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa's bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..Edited transcript of the interview.Alec Hogg: Well, I am a big fan, as I think most South Africans are, of Tatjana Smith, not least because she is our most medalled Olympian of all time. But I was still surprised that the interview we did with her last week got more than 150,000 people watching it, and staying with it, watching for more than ten minutes on average. It shows she definitely hit a nerve. And we're going to explore that a little further today, with Brett Redelinghuys. He's from Masters Water Polo, but he's a lot more than that. Maybe we can start at the beginning with you, Brett. Doing my research, I noticed you were banned by Swimming South Africa for ten years. What's the background to that?Brett Redelinghuys: Correct. So that's where all this problem started, Alec. I was an administrator. Well, I still play, I have played since I was twelve years old. I ran Western Cape water polo for a period, and the problem was we had a number of players coming through who were getting to national level and dealing with Swimming South Africa, and having an absolute nightmare. And what we were doing is losing [many] players. Honestly, the numbers coming through compared to the numbers we retain are terrible. I had the choice to either engage with Swimming South Africa and try to fix it, or just stand back and allow it to carry on happening. Stupidly, I engaged. We fought them for many years, complaining about how athletes were treated, how teams were selected, how processes were run. In 2019, Alan Fritz called a meeting of all the water polo seniors, if you want to call us the chairs of the various bodies, to try to get us all together to present his proposal for the way forward.Funnily enough, that got us to exactly where we are today: water polo eventually became its own body and ran itself from then on. Sadly, about six months after that, he started withdrawing support from it, and then Covid hit us. During Covid, I invited the chairs of all the other provinces to come together and find a solution, to take what he had proposed and push it forward. I think it was 2022, eventually we were ready. We had sat with legal, we had looked at the best processes for how to fix the problem. And the problem was simple: to request a legal amendment to the SSA constitution. In that, we would ask that water polo, instead of running as a body underneath Swimming South Africa, would separate because of its diverse nature, and instead of being an affiliate we would be an associate member. And we needed the constitution changed to do that. I put out an email to the water polo people just before our nationals, in 2022 I think it was, saying, listen, we're going to meet now at these nationals, why don't we come a day early, we can all sit down, go through this, make sure we've got it right, and then present.Alan Fritz got that email. I received a notice of intention to suspend, because I was apparently trying to set up a rival water polo body, and this was against the constitution, bringing the game into disrepute, and so on. For a month I tried to get Alan Fritz to respond, and gave him various information to show that we weren't doing that, that we were using the constitution legally. All the emails were ignored, and that wasn't just sent to Alan Fritz, it was sent to the executive, to my district executive, to my provincial executive, and so on. So the whole chain knew what was going on.Needless to say, the night before nationals, where I was the manager of my team that was going to nationals, at ten thirty, when I was due to catch a flight at five a.m. the next morning, I received an email from Shaun Adriaanse informing me that I had been suspended. Which meant, in theory, I wasn't supposed to go to nationals. I went anyway, I just didn't sit on the side of the pool with the team, so the team wouldn't be harmed in any way.And since then we've been fighting. Ten months later, after sending many emails through legal asking, please can we get the information on what the charge is, what the constitutional basis is, and so on, we eventually got a response giving us, I think it was four days' notice. We had to book off three days for a hearing, an online hearing. Neither my lawyer, Matt Kemp, nor I could be there on that notice. We informed them of that. They went ahead with the meeting anyway, without us there. Matt Kemp's associate sat in for the first hour, and eventually they closed the meeting after our legal representative left, and they found me guilty and banned me for ten years.Alec Hogg: Those names are familiar. They've hit the headlines. Adriaanse and Fritz, are these the guys who've been suspended now?Brett Redelinghuys: Yes. Matt Kemp is the lawyer, no, not him. Yes, those are the two who've now been suspended. It's karma's come round and got hold of them. Alan Fritz and Shaun Adriaanse have been the drivers of Swimming South Africa. They're not the only ones, there are others.And sadly, in my opinion, the board needs to go. It needs to go because they are all complicit, not just in things like my suspension, but in things like the High Performance Centre, in things like the ethics breaches they've been informed about. All of them have been informed, and none of them are standing up. And I get it, it's a bullying culture. And it's a culture that says if you do as I did, where I put my head up, it will be chopped off, as Tatjana found out.Alec Hogg: Okay, so we've got your side of the story, and to be fair, you've been banned for ten years by the same guys who've themselves now been suspended. But you mentioned, almost in passing, the Franschhoek High Performance Centre. That's an area that's now the centre of attention. More than a hundred and ten million rand was allocated, was spent on it, some from international bodies, some from the National Lotteries Commission. What was it intended to be? Because clearly you'd have done plenty of research on this.Brett Redelinghuys: Yeah, so three years ago we happened to be told about this High Performance Centre and went to have a look. And sorry, just to come back, your figure, a hundred and ten million, I don't know where that number's coming from, it's too high. The number from their financials is closer to fifty million, forty-nine point something. But yes, it's snowballed.Alec Hogg: Thank you for correcting that, it's in the media as a hundred and eleven, so I thought, okay, let's call it fifty, that sounds better.Brett Redelinghuys: So we found out about this three years ago, drove out there to have a look, and took photos of the decimation of this beautiful school. It's over a hundred years old, one of the oldest schools in the Western Cape. They had a fully functioning swimming pool, a fully functioning athletics track and rugby field, tennis courts, netball courts. There was an agreement, Swimming South Africa were late to the party there, between a company called Train Camp and the school. Train Camp was going to come in, redevelop the facilities, and commercialise it. So they needed the lease on that property, which was overturned two Mondays ago in court.They then contacted Swimming South Africa to come in as a party. Now, a lot of these details, Alec, are hard to confirm. The only information we have is from the latest High Court proceedings where the lease was overturned, and that's given us a good timeline on this whole saga, but it still sits as it is. Swimming South Africa eventually came in as a partner. Although if you look at their financials, what they say is something vastly different, they label themselves as the developer with full development control, which they didn't have. But anyway, our problem with the High Performance Centre was there was no presentation to members. The executive made this decision, and, from information we have which we can't confirm, they were given the agreement and told it needed to be signed, and it was signed. One of the people involved refused to sign it and was told that if he didn't sign, there would be a disciplinary matter against him. So there was no plan for what happens if you put fifty million rand into somebody else's property and it goes pear-shaped. Where was the risk analysis a normal company would do, more so when it's a non-profit using its members' money?Alec Hogg: So was the fifty million put into this swimming pool? And what happened, was it upgraded? Because it's a lot of money for a swimming pool. What does it look like now?Brett Redelinghuys: Yes. So they built a fifty-metre pool next to the old twenty-five-metre pool, and redid the twenty-five-metre pool. But all of it is still completely unfinished and completely unusable. I'll send photographs, or if you look on the internet you'll see them. It's completely unusable.There were also two hostels, one is now being used, one has been totally stripped. There were netball courts and so on that have been wrecked. The decimation is massive. And the worst thing about this is there are kids who came to that school in grade eight and matriculated, and never had the ability to use their own facilities. They have to drive somewhere else to use a rugby field or whatever.Alec Hogg: So let's just understand this, Brett. There's a swimming pool at a school in Franschhoek. It's called the High Performance Centre. It gets fifty million rand allocated to it from Swimming South Africa. Was that fifty million actually spent, or was only part of it spent? Clearly it hasn't been successful, because you can see, as you say, the pictures on the internet of the weeds growing through. There's no water in the pool, you don't even have to worry about chlorine. What actually happened there? Did anyone ever swim in it?Brett Redelinghuys: No, completely unusable. World Aquatics gave five hundred thousand US dollars at the start, that was 2022 or 2023 I think, to get this off the ground. That was about eight and a half million rand at the time. The Sports Trust put in six point two million, and the Lotto has put in over thirty-five million. Money has been spent, building has happened, and so on. I'm told, and it's not confirmed, that there are tiles and heaters sitting in a warehouse waiting to be added to the facility. But no swimming happens except for the ducks and the frogs, and that's it.Alec Hogg: And the contractor?Brett Redelinghuys: So, again, there was another court case, we can't find the details, we're digging for it, but there was a fight between the contractor, Train Camp, and the school. Train Camp, who had the lease, was sequestrated last year, and in court two weeks ago they had the lease overturned because it was found to be unlawful. It was never signed correctly, and they never fulfilled the extra provisions they were told to fulfil in order for it to be signed.Alec Hogg: So just so we understand, because we're not as close to it as the swimming community obviously is, Fritz and Adriaanse were running Swimming South Africa as their fiefdom. It's not too difficult to work that one out. Were they in any way corrupt in this, or was it just incompetence? Because fifty million's gone, there's no swimming pool being used, and that includes money from the international body, which I guess is one of the reasons they're so interested in what's going on at Swimming South Africa now. Were these characters corrupt, or just incompetent?Brett Redelinghuys: Right now it's just incompetence, but what we're busy trying to do is get a PAIA application in, to get into the actual financials, because on the financials they publish, they just say we received so much from Lotto and paid so much to the Franschhoek High Performance Centre. They don't break it down in any way. But I have it on good authority that there was a hell of a lot of travel by those executives to Franschhoek, staying in nice hotels, and so on. So it's hard to say there was fraud, but my maths, and I'm not the greatest mathematician, says you've spent fifty million and you've got what you've got. If you look at the pool Swimming South Africa built in Pietermaritzburg recently, an indoor pool, done, covered, that cost just over fifty million, and it's functioning. So simple maths says the money wasn't spent in the right place. And the only way to get to the bottom of it is a PAIA application, which we're now pursuing, to look at who paid whom, and when. But it's not good.Alec Hogg: So the potential for kickbacks, and so on. Let's move on from there, because that's a cesspit of its own. Tell us more about water polo, which has now apparently moved out of Swimming South Africa. Is that the case, and what have the implications been?Brett Redelinghuys: So, after I was suspended for putting forward that suggestion, the water polo community, the three big areas, KZN, Western Cape and Gauteng, all went to their members and said, listen, we need to break away, there's no way we can fix this from within. I can give you a whole rundown on why you can't fix it from within, but that's for another day. So water polo went to its members and asked, do you agree we make this move? I think it was ninety-five, ninety-eight percent of members said, we vote to break away. So they did. They formed a non-profit organisation with directors to get the thing going. They held their first AGM last October, voted in their first lot of directors, and off they went. We then got independence. It runs how international bodies say it should, and it was modelled on Cricket South Africa, because the legal advisor we had had helped set that up. So it now runs and functions, but it's limited, it does everything right from the very bottom, clubs, provincial, and so on. But the thing it's not allowed to do is national teams. So you'll see Swimming South Africa is still sending national teams to various tournaments, and you'll see the results, because I'd say less than five percent of the national-quality players are supporting Swimming South Africa. The other ninety-five percent are with the new body, SA Water Polo.Alec Hogg: So are they getting hammered? Or is the South African team going to international tournaments not winning?Brett Redelinghuys: They're not winning, and it's not because the athletes are bad, well, obviously, if you choose from five percent of players you're going to get a lesser result, that's maths, that's logic. But the main reason is exactly why SA Water Polo split off: there's no preparation, there's no planning, it's just whoever wants to go, let's go. We recently sent a team to this new "fours" format, which doesn't work quite like normal water polo, it's more like tennis, you win sets, and once you've won three sets the game stops. We didn't win a set, we came last. It's not that the players are bad, it's that we'd never played this format in this country before, never coached it, never trained it. Yet we sent eight women to play in Croatia, because it gets you in a blazer and it goes on people's CVs. And that's the danger of where we are. So we still have people supporting Swimming South Africa, but SA Water Polo is running its own programme and now running international events too, going to international events, but as a non-South African team.Alec Hogg: What happened at the Paris Olympics?Brett Redelinghuys: It's a bit of an ugly story, and it's why I say the people running things, after the two heads were cut off, three others popped up, one of them Dean Price, the high-performance person. The reason we didn't go to Paris is we were told in Doha, about six months before, that we suddenly had to come twelfth in the world to qualify. That was a local decision by our high-performance people. If you don't get twelfth, you shouldn't be at the Olympics, which is logical, but it's not something you decide six months out with no preparation and no chance to change. So, on the side of the pool, when the players got to Doha, they were told, by the way, if you don't make twelfth you don't go to the Olympics. Then, after Doha, they happened to look on social media and saw that South Africa had withdrawn both its teams, but they hadn't been told by Swimming South Africa. They found out by seeing Romania and Canada celebrating that they were going to the Olympics because South Africa wasn't. That's the disorganisation we're trying to get rid of.Alec Hogg: We're seeing it in a broader sense across South Africa, where regulators and people appointed to bodies are maybe feeling their oats, they're starting to impose their authority and their power. But in sports bodies, what many people don't appreciate is that the politics can be far more hectic than in a much bigger form of governance. Is that a similar situation at Swimming South Africa, are the politics quite nasty there?Brett Redelinghuys: Definitely so, Alec, and it goes into other spheres too, it pushes into SASCOC, it pushes into the sports ministry. Those bodies are supposed to oversee, you'll see Gayton McKenzie says it's not his job, it's SASCOC's job, and SASCOC are very quiet. But both bodies should be overseeing, not the selection of teams, or whether I'm better than Brett, no, they should be looking at governance, because they give money to these bodies. They should be looking at governance, and they're not. For more than four years we've taken about five different cases of bullying and so on to SASCOC. When we went to them about the executive overstaying their terms of reference, I think Alan Fritz has been there twenty or twenty-four years, [others] twenty-four years, and so on, and showed them that they'd changed their constitution to say members can only serve three terms of four years consecutively, that was because, and their logic was logical, because the King Code demands it, but what they did was wipe the slate clean of the twenty years they'd already served, and say, right, you've got another twelve years, off you go. That's their logic. And they got a legal letter from a lawyer they paid, confirming that the constitution doesn't look back, it only looks forward, and SASCOC accepted that.So, yes, there's a lot of politics, sadly. And people from within Swimming South Africa get themselves voted onto the various oversight bodies, and then they protect the federation. That's why it needs a clean sweep, right from the top. You can't cut these heads off and hope the heads that grow back are better, they're the same, or worse.Alec Hogg: How does the international body suspend the president and the chief executive of a country's federation? I know they've had a report from the disciplinary arm of the international body, and they've been very aggressive in how they've termed it, but how is that actually possible?Brett Redelinghuys: That's possible because a number of us made complaints to the World Aquatics Integrity Unit. Now, the good thing about World Aquatics is they've split themselves, the Integrity Unit is completely independent. I started on that two years ago, and eventually, a month ago, we got an email saying the best thing had happened, for a lot of us. But there are others too, the artistic swimmers sent in a complaint, the divers did, various swimmers have. So that's how this thing came about. We submitted a lot of documentation to World Aquatics, not only on the High Performance Centre, but on other governance issues, bullying, and [an allegation, unverified, that the convenor of water polo was having an affair with the mother of a child he was involved in selecting], and so on. So we submitted this, and luckily, after two years of pushing, prodding, begging and pleading, they acted. But they had to act, Alec.Alec Hogg: We got an article on BizNews from the Olympic champion Roland Schoeman, where he sets out chapter and verse of what happened to him, and it makes for quite riveting reading. We're going to talk to Roland on Wednesday. But looking forward, Brett, what does accountability, what does governance in Swimming South Africa look like from here?Brett Redelinghuys: Sadly, I think if it's allowed to stay as is, it'll be a cut-and-paste, I'll be a lot greyer and I'll be back on your show in ten years' time with the same problem. To my mind, what we've asked of World Aquatics is that they send in a steering committee of two or three independents, and we bring others. And I know you asked Tatjana whether she'd be on the board, the danger there is, I'm not saying Tatjana would be good or bad, or that I would be good or bad. What we need is people who can administer the sport and hold the sport in higher regard than themselves or any political position. If you look at what water polo has done, it's done it well, I don't think it's perfect, I think it needs to be more diverse, but it's done it well, it has independence, and it's grown.Alec Hogg: So if you could repeat that model in each discipline, the way the USA does, the way Canada does, the way Australia does, each body runs itself with its own directors, and then put an umbrella over it, a president's council or whatever you want to call it, that deals with World Aquatics, that would mean no one sport dominates another.Brett Redelinghuys: Exactly, because if you just look at the name, Swimming South Africa, it tells you they don't give a damn about diving, artistic swimming, open water, water polo. They care about swimming first and foremost, read their financials, read any report they do. The rest of them are the redheaded stepchildren. Nobody really cares about them. Each body needs to run itself. It's doable, Canada does it, Australia does it, the USA does it, and it works. Look at them.Alec Hogg: Water polo went on its own and seems to be doing pretty well. Thank you, we look forward to following this story. I'm Alec Hogg from BizNews.com.