Blame artists’ misery on UTAM, SA’s unholy trinity of acronymic mayhem

The Constitutional Court judgment against Jacob Zuma last week and consequent sentencing of the former president to 15 months in prison for contempt sent a nation desperate for good news into a temporary state of glee. We knew it would be short-lived; soon the reminders that we are living in a locked-down, beaten-down country would pervade again.

For a brief moment it felt good to bask in a win for the rule of law — one for the good guys. A tick in the “pros” column of Cyril Ramaphosa’s presidency. A sign of hope.

But it’s never that simple. Even if he were the arch good guy, Ramaphosa is so mired in bad guys (inept guys, corrupt guys and guys who manage to combine these traits) at levels of government below him that he will always, inevitably, be tarnished by association.

To put it more strongly: in every instance where the president does not use his executive power to get rid of the rotten wood in his cabinet, thus allowing ministerial bungling to further damage our battered organs of state, he is, ultimately, to blame.

For those in the arts sector, this was brought home during a virtual media briefing held a few hours after the court ruling, announcing the release of a report compiled by the Theatre and Dance Alliance (Tada) into the failure of the Presidential Employment Stimulus Package (Pesp) to provide meaningful support to artists in dire need.

The arts component of the Pesp has been a sorry saga; anyone with an interest in the arts in SA will know the main players. There is sport, arts and culture minister Nathi Mthethwa, who was terrible at his job before Covid-19 and has only become worse as the pandemic-decimated arts sector. There is the National Arts Council (NAC) — mutatis mutandis.

Responsibility for 'the failure of the Pesp project and the wastage of millions of rand of public funding' lies, in the first instance, with the president — for waiting until October to announce the stimulus package — and the group of ministers who advised the delay.

—  Report

Then there are the heroes who have fought tooth and nail against this destruction-by-neglect. The artists’ movement Abahlali base NAC, led by opera singer Sibongile Mngoma, occupied the NAC offices for more than two months and has since taken its protest to the arts department. Fittingly, these forms of opposition have entailed an element of creativity, pageantry and spectacle: music, dance and poetry to sustain the unglamorous task of sitting in.

The heroes of Tada gave a very different, but no less impressive, performance in presenting the findings of their report.

Mthethwa had previously commissioned a forensic investigation into the NAC/Pesp shambles (an amount of R300m was by turns wasted, lost, under-allocated, over-allocated or otherwise misspent). It has rightly been observed that such investigations are unlikely to point the finger of blame at the individuals or institutions commissioning them. So Tada established its own investigative team and started digging. Its dedicated, patient labour has yielded a detailed and damning report.

At the briefing, after being introduced by the alliance’s chair, Lindiwe Letwaba, task team members Mike van Graan and Yvette Hardie gave a blow-by-blow breakdown of where and how things went wrong. Their rigorous critique was specific to the state’s response to Covid-19 in terms of the arts sector, but the indications and recommendations of their report have much wider ramifications.

The problem, they note, starts at the top. Responsibility for “the failure of the Pesp project and the wastage of millions of rand of public funding” lies, in the first instance, with the president — for waiting until October to announce the stimulus package — and the group of ministers who advised the delay. The Treasury, too, is complicit because of its subsequent refusal to extend the time frame for the project.

The report plumbs the messy depths of the national department and the NAC, acronyms that have long caused a shudder down many an artist’s spine, and that combined with Pesp to create an unholy trinity of acronymic misery, a woeful trifecta that has compounded, rather than relieved, the suffering of SA artists under Covid-19.

It all makes for grim, but necessary and, indeed, urgent reading. The arts community owes Tada a debt of gratitude. And once again we appeal to President Ramaphosa: give us a minister who can fix the broken arts infrastructure.