A few weeks ago, the Sunday Times ran an article about the arts sector’s growing disillusionment with the minister of arts and culture because of the slowness with which matters at the National Arts Council (NAC) were being addressed. This prompted a media release from the department hinting that a new NAC board would be in place soon. The head of (non-) communication at the Department of Arts and Culture, Andile Xaba — a one-time arts journalist who now, unsurprisingly, displays a healthy disrespect for the media — also responded to the Sunday Times article in a letter, and patronisingly informed all that the appointment of a new NAC board was a ”process” and ”not an event”.
The department has been managing the ”process” of appointing a new board since December last year, when it called for nominations for board members to replace those who had been fired by the minister. Eight months after more than 80 nominations had been received, the ”process” was still, well, in process. The process is quite simple, really. The NAC Act requires the minister to appoint an independent panel to publicly interview nominees, and then to submit a shortlist of no more than 22 names, based on these interviews, to the minister, who then selects board members from this shortlist.
The Act doesn’t require the Cabinet to ratify the names of the NAC board, but the department statement indicates that after the Cabinet has deliberated on the names, the board will assume office. Apparently, the Cabinet has in the past rejected some nominations, and while the criteria for such rejections are entirely unclear, it is ironic that the last board approved by the Cabinet was fired later because of serious allegations of corruption and mal-administration levelled against it.
What the Act does require is that the public be informed of the nominations so that ”any member of the public may object in writing to the nomination of any person”, the idea being that, should a nominee be known to have serious deficiencies, this could be made known before an appointment was finalised. However, the public has been kept completely in the dark about the list of nominees and the interviewing ”process”.
When the arts community lobbied vigorously for an independent, arm’s-length body to channel public funding to the arts through a statutory NAC, it was to ensure that politicians wouldn’t simply appoint lackeys to positions of power and influence who would then undermine freedom of creative expression by allocating resources only to those who conformed with, or who did not question, the political status quo. Hence, it was stipulated in the law that the public would make nominations, that these nominees would be interviewed in public by an independent panel, that the public could object to nominees, that the minister would be obliged to select from the shortlist and that the board would then elect its own chairperson.
In less than eight years (the NAC Act was passed in 1997), the arts department has presided over the demise of transparency, political independence and critical thought at the NAC. First it changed the law so that the minister now appoints the chairperson of the NAC, giving enormous political weight to the incumbent. Then the public was robbed of its legal rights to witness the nominees being interviewed and to object to any nominee. (The interviews took place earlier this week in the cultural metropolis of Boksburg, with the public being informed on the day these started only because The Star requested the information.) Finally, for all the intentions of appointing an independent board in a publicly transparent manner, the Cabinet has the final say and may use essentially political criteria to approve or reject nominations.
The NAC Act states that ”an independent panel … shall compile a shortlist from the nominations … after interviewing each nominee in public”. But the arts department’s approach is to have the panel make a shortlist from the nominations based on their CVs, and then to interview this shortlist — 30 or so — in public, and then to submit a final shortlist to the minister. Whatever the practicalities of this arrangement, it is not consistent with the law. Nominees who are not interviewed in public would be within their rights to mount a legal challenge. As would ”the public”, because of the failure of the department to make known the list of nominees so that the public could exercise its right to object. If this happens, it would again delay the appointment of a new board, and again because of the bungling of the department.
As with our sports teams, we expect our artists to practise excellence while we put up with the profound incompetence, mediocrity and disrespect for the practitioners of those who govern these respective areas. Why?