It took a stroke of a pen for the apartheid government to ban black South Africans from all national sports. It was a decision based on the laws of the day and life continued thereafter.Protests across the world were ignored and only those countries that stood with the National Party government permitted all-white teams to tour their countries.It took blood and sweat to change the system and soon after 1994, when we elected a government based on the will of the people, we were accepted internationally as equals.But a big question remained: How to fast-track all races into sporting codes that had been largely the preserve of whites?It remains a challenge. Whenever we speak of fair representation in sport, we hear about standards and sponsorships.Yesterday, Sports Minister Fikile Mbalula finally woke up and faced the reality.Mbalula has banned our national cricket and rugby federations from hosting or bidding for international tournaments for at least a year while they increase representation of black players. He also targeted other codes which he said had failed to transform 22 years into democracy.This morning Mbalula will be called names and reminded that sponsors will pull out and that his decision was irrational. Already the Democratic Alliance has said that Mbalula's ban is just a gimmick and a diversion from his own failure to develop sports in the country.We hold no brief for Mbalula, but we believe we should be frank as a nation and it is clear that we are going nowhere slowly in transforming our sporting landscape.We can point fingers and argue that forced transformation will lower standards and our good players will emigrate. But we cannot escape the reality that transformation is a non-negotiable for most people in South Africa.We back former president Thabo Mbeki's call yesterday for a national dialogue to move South Africa forward and see Mbalula's initiative as a part of that process...