Mr President, fire the dead wood that is ‘incompetent, aloof, out-of-touch’ Mthethwa

I am incredibly fortunate to be an arts columnist — to write, each week, about a tiny sliver of what artists in SA and around the world are doing, making, thinking, dreaming and creating. In the midst of pandemics and poverty and warfare there are, at any given moment, millions of people doing art: from solitary painters in makeshift studios to collaborative sea-shanty remixes on TikTok.       

I’d far rather allocate this column to an artist doing something. But as our country’s arts and culture sector continues to plummet deeper and deeper into crisis, I have no choice but to write about someone who does nothing. I refer, of course, to our sport, arts and culture minister, Nathi Mthethwa.

This won’t be the first time I have griped about him. I’ve been pointing to his patent shortcomings since he was appointed to the role in 2014 — when he was “demoted” from police minister by finger-wagging former president Jacob Zuma. That Mthethwa remains in his position almost seven years later (now with additional responsibility for sport; the less said about that the better) betrays the ANC’s attitude to the arts and President Cyril Ramaphosa’s inability to get rid of dead wood.

The woefully inadequate response of Mthethwa’s ministry to the social and economic effects of Covid-19 spurred many complaints from prominent figures in the creative industry last year. You would think he had learnt not to blow his own horn. But Mthethwa shares with various members of the cabinet the delusion that if you curate a version of the world on social media and through bland press releases you can simply ignore reality.

Reading through the minister’s Twitter account, you begin to understand how he sees his job: toe the party line, pay tribute to artists when they die and claim credit for things that others are doing (Business and Arts SA, the National Cultural Observatory and so on). There is one tweet that is missing from his timeline because he deleted it after fierce backlash. “South African theatre is alive and well,” he typed last week, listing a few regional state-subsidised theatres and affirming that they offer “an array of indigenous drama and dance etc”.

Mthethwa’s tweet was a particularly egregious example of his utter disconnection from the constituency he is supposed to serve. Yet for most people in the arts sector it merely confirms what was already known.

Never mind the peculiar form of parochialism and unquestioning nationalism Mthethwa has expected from SA artists during his tenure. What this retracted claim also confirms is that he really thinks a thriving arts sector consists of a handful of arts venues whose platforms, he wrongly believes, he can directly or indirectly control because he pulls the purse strings — and damn anyone who hopes to produce work independently.

This places institutions such as Johannesburg’s Market Theatre, Cape Town’s Artscape and others in an invidious position, tainting them by forced association with a minister widely loathed across our country’s arts communities. And it consigns everyone else (organisations, individuals, collectives) to an underfunded, irrelevant outsider status, conveniently forgetting two indisputable truths.

First, under ordinary circumstances the creative industry generates an enormous amount of money compared with paltry sums contributed by the government. Second, artists are suffering under lockdown; they are hustlers and entrepreneurs, but their income is as precarious and contingent as anyone’s in our fragile economy. The performing arts have been especially hard hit — no gatherings means no audiences — and while theatre can never be killed off, it is anything but well.

Mthethwa’s tweet was a particularly egregious example of his utter disconnection from the constituency he is supposed to serve. Yet for most people in the arts sector it merely confirms what was already known. In the words of the petition to have him removed from office, now in circulation under the hashtag #NathiMustGo, “the tweet reflects our long experience of the minister as incompetent, aloof and out of touch”.

The petition calls for Mthethwa to resign by January 31, but this, of course, will never happen. So come February, the petitioners will approach his boss. Admittedly, Ramaphosa has a lot on his plate. But Mr President, if I may, this is low-hanging fruit. Fire Nathi Mthethwa and cross one item off your To Do list.