Ferial Haffajee
The government will spend just over R310- million on the arts this year. The amount budgeted for arts is about R7-million more than last year’s arts vote. But in real terms, state support for the arts will be cut.
Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology Director General Roger Jardine said the cut was not as high as other departments had suffered. “One of the reasons we’ve done so well,” he said, “is because we instituted budgetary reform before other departments.”
What Jardine’s done in his five terms in office is to change the budget to suit the new arts policy and to trim staff costs as a percentage of the budget. At 6,4% of the entire department’s costs, the arts department is among the more lean in government.
The young director general, who has served two ministers, has quit and will leave for the private sector in May. But he leaves a new arts policy and a budget to reflect new priorities.
The National Arts Council (NAC), with a budget vote of R25-million, receives the lion’s share, while the performing arts councils, which once sapped the highest percentage of arts spend, now get less and less.
The increase in the NAC’s share from R15- million to R25-million is a clear vote of the government’s faith in the body, as are Minister Ben Ngubane’s assurances that the NAC will be most likely to administrate the funds the department is hoping to reap for the arts via the national lottery.
The four arts councils are scrambling for other sources of funding, including private sponsorships and provincial budget allocations. In the Western Cape, almost a quarter of the Cape Performing Arts Board (Capab) budget is funded by the provincial legislature.
Whereas the four provincial councils received almost 70% of the arts and culture budget in 1994, this amount has now been trimmed to 32,4% of the budget.
Instead, the government’s new priorities are reflected in the growing grants to new projects including the National Heritage Council, Business Arts South Africa and into film grants for young aspirants.
Together these new projects will receive R55,8-million of the budget, up by about R11- million on last year. Jardine says that the R10,7-million grant to film is particularly important for the fruits the project has begun to reap.
Filmmakers who benefited have reported that they are able to leverage additional funding after receiving seed funding from the government. In addition, two films by Zola Maseko and Mark Gevisser, supported by the programme, have won international acclaim.
Says Jardine: “This budget is the culmination of our efforts over the last five years to restructure the department. Now we can show that we’ve put our money where our mouths are.” Increasingly, the arts department is looking at ways to make money from art. Its Cultural Industries Growth Strategy “represents a paradigm shift. Culture is increasingly becoming a contributor to gross domestic product,” says Jardine.
Australia’s film industry is an example, as is Mali’s music industry. In South Africa, arts strategists say earnings can be generated from craft, publishing and music.
Major arts spending
National Arts Council – R25-million
National Heritage Council – R993 000
Performing arts institutions – R93-million
Film Fund – R10,6-million
International culture promotion – R3.6- million
Cultural Industries Growth Strategy – R3-million
Language Diversity – R26-million
Museum, Archives, Monuments – R140-million