There’s a building somewhere in a city in one of the country’s nine provinces that used to be a theatre. That was when the people who ran it — even four years ago — had skill. Passion. Experience. But the good people have left. Resigned in frustration. Anger. Hopelessness.
The only thing that the person now in charge has in common with theatre, is that he is called the acting manager. But he doesn’t act. Not on the stage, nor as a manager. He once was a clerk, who was given the senior job notwithstanding superior applicants. For he probably had the most important qualification. His sister was a city councillor at the time of his appointment.
Over the past few years, more than R700 000 worth of equipment has allegedly been “relocated”. Lighting equipment, radios, orchestral chairs, music stands and a 16-channel sound desk have been redistributed by, if not among, the new entrepreneurial class that appropriates public facilities and goods for personal enrichment. Much of the stock of cutlery and crockery at the theatre facility has gone missing. Yet, from one of the offices, an employee paid by the municipality runs a private company hiring out crockery and cutlery.
The building pleads guilty to an increasing lack of maintenance. The toilets confess to having no loo paper. The basins, no soap. It’s only a matter of time before the toilet seats find themselves relocated to redistribution and development programme houses in the vicinity, sold on by an enterprising theatre official who will give new meaning to getting “bums on seats”.
And why is this allowed to happen? Because the people with authority, those charged with political and governance responsibility, simply don’t care. One senior official to whom the theatre management should report, spends much of her office time selling waterless pots. Subsidised by taxpayers to moonlight. Another is an apartheid-era bureaucrat now rewarded with a senior job for helping to bring the constituency of the tribal chief to whom he is related, into the arms of the ruling party.
Delivery crucified by political patronage. Transformation sacrificed at the altar of incompetence. Post-apartheid South Africa is littered with black, apartheid-era bureaucrats in senior civil servant positions, who are now as major obstacles to serving the poor and democracy as they were prior to 1994, while literally thousands of skilled, experienced individuals with a real historical and current commitment to transforming the country for the better, are denied public service for being the wrong colour.
The moral and political imperatives underpinning transformation, affirmative action and black empowerment are eroded by those — a frightening number if 41 000 civil servants are being investigated for criminal activity — who use these as smokescreens to pursue their selfish interests, to deflect criticism and brazenly to justify their greed.
Sadly, the story of this theatre is the story of many other theatres. They should be vehicles for achieving the post-apartheid dream of bringing the arts to the people around the country. Instead, they have become empty shells, expendable vehicles for exercising patronage and for rewarding political loyalty. Eleven years later, it is time to do an audit of publicly funded cultural institutions that exist at national, provincial and local levels.
Yet, who will do it? The government departments responsible for these institutions are hardly any better. There is a general lack of vision, a lack of leadership and an absence of political will. There is only a going through the motions and empty, meaningless jargon on the part of those in authority.
The message is clear, artists. In case you didn’t know it, you are on your own.