Summit bids to forge new policy on arts and culture

TODAY marks the start of a crucial arts and culture summit at Turbine Hall in Newtown, Johannesburg, whose author, the Department of Arts and Culture, hopes will bring sanity to an arts sector that has long been in disarray, disunited, and whose contribution to the fiscus has, at best, been suspect.

This has made government planning for the sector difficult. Just how much the sector contributes to job creation has been a difficult question to answer, even though the monetary value is said to run into billions.

Paul Mashatile, the minister of arts and culture, wants speculation about the importance of the arts and culture sector to stop, concrete answers to the question of its contribution to the economy quantified and specified, and new policies adopted, hence the summit.

The summit will see policy gurus, artists, arts activists and administrators sit down to craft the way forward for this sector, often regarded as the soul of the nation. The task will not be easy because of a number of factors, including the fact that institutions that are supposed to be part of this process of leading the way forward do not seem to be ready.

At the core of implementation of whatever recommendations come through are first top officials at the Department of Arts and Culture, where senior positions remain vacant, including that of the director-general. Being the chief accounting officer, this person, who has still not been appointed, will be expected to lead the process in forging the new arts and culture policy.

Mashatile, in answer to a question by Sowetan two weeks ago, said interviews had been done, but that the Cabinet still had to approve the appointment.

By yesterday, that had not happened. This simply means that the department is charting a crucial new arts policy without a chief accounting officer.

The institutional capacity to implement policy and recommendations emanating from the summit is also questionable. Only two days ago, members of the National Film and Video Foundation were inaugurated by Mashatile, raising the question of how prepared they are to engage in policy since most of them still have to be inducted into arts policy issues.

Members of the National Arts Council were also inaugurated only three weeks ago, and out of the new members only three had experience from the previous NAC, raising the issue of whether they are ready to contribute to the new policy.

The NAC has been rocked by factionalism, with almost all its senior executives having written to the department, complaining bitterly about its current leadership, an act that almost amounted to a revolt.

It is this institution that, among other crucial responsibilities, funds artists and their policy. Just how prepared is this council to engage in issues of crafting a new policy as Mashatile wants it to, is also questionable, given its history of staff squabbles.

Morale is said to be so low that senior staff hardly speak to each other. It is these challenges that the new NAC board, led by businesswoman Angie Makwetla, has to tackle from the beginning if sanity is to prevail, and its mandate carried out efficiently.

The National Heritage Council operates without a board, and the process of appointing one is still in progress.

This body, just like the NFVF and NAC, is crucial to the implementation of the recommendations that will emerge from the Newtown summit in the next 24 hours.