Choreographers took a little break from filling out application forms for residencies in Britain and France. Writers put on hold their funding applications to the Swiss Arts Council. The queue of theatre groups at the Royal Netherlands Embassy was the shortest that it had been for the week. The pressure on the Swedish government to provide funding to South African arts groups was relieved, if only for a few hours.
For the South African Minister of Finance, Trevor Manuel, was about to deliver his Budget speech. And all across the country, artists were huddled around their hire-purchased television sets, holding their breaths, their thumbs and the ”final warning” letters from their bank managers. Some musicians were shamelessly plagiarising Eddie Grant as they waited. ”Give us hope, dear Trevor, Help us cope, please Trevor, Give us rope, ou Trevor, when the Budget comes.”
During the past decade, the arts have been sold out increasingly to Manuel’s ”amorphous market”. There were no automatic hand-outs to struggle artists, or anyone else for that matter, for the economy in Manuel-mode shifted to another Gear and was steered along the heavy toll-roads of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and World Trade Organisation. Subsidies for creativity were decreased. (Except at the Market Theatre, which has nevertheless become increasingly amorphous.) Jobs were lost in the sector. (Except at the Department of Arts and Culture, which has now become one of the primary employers in the arts.) Remuneration remained stagnant or declined. (Except for the senior management of the National Arts Council, where salary increases appear to have bettered even the sharp rise in electioneering hot air.)
Poverty alleviation is among the targets of this year’s Budget. Social spending is commendably up, and one trusts that this is not simply so because of it being an election year. But what of the poverty of the mind, the starving of the soul, the kwashiorkor of imagination? While bread is important, we do not live by bread alone. A bit of cake would also do nicely, thank you.
But the minister has declined to remove VAT from books as campaigned for by many writers in order to advance a culture of reading. One of the reasons suggested by the minister is that it is difficult to define a book for tax purposes. Yet, if reading material was currently zero-rated for VAT purposes, and the minister now wanted to add VAT to books, I have little doubt that publicly paid legal minds would have wasted time in defining a book.
How did we define an arm? Is it a corvette? A helicopter? A submarine perhaps? Or maybe a fighter aircraft? Difficult to say, so we simply ticked all of the above, and spent R50-billion on these weapons. The arms cost us a few legs. Not to make war on poverty, but on people. Not to reconstruct and build, but to destroy. Not to fight against disease, but against life itself.
But the arms deal has huge economic spin-offs in other areas, it was argued. And what, then, of the potential spin-offs for the economy if people could acquire more knowledge and insights through reading? What of the spin-offs for democracy if people were more informed through reading? What of the spin-offs for the quality of people’s lives if they could simply read for pleasure?
Oh well, at least Janice Honeyman will be happy with VAT status quo. She could direct another play called VAT-maar-weer.
There once was a bumper sticker that said something to the effect of ”Wouldn’t it be nice if education had all the funds it needed, and the defence force had to have cake sales to raise money for arms?”.
No one is saying that we don’t need an army. But as our artists line up once more with their begging bowls stretched out to foreign governments, one just has to wonder about what our spending priorities really say about our commitment to building a just, humane and holistic society.