Johannesburg - The National Arts Council (NAC), which came under fire for alleged mismanagement of funds to beneficiaries, is investigating way of improving allocation, says board member Dr Sipho Sithole.
Last year, the Presidency made a special employment stimulus programme available to the sector to disburse via the NAC and the National Film and Video Foundation. The Presidential Employment Stimulus Programme (Pesp) is geared towards employment creation and retention initiatives for artists, creatives, heritage sector workers and cultural workers.
The initiative was in response to the pandemic that has affected creatives who do not often have a 9 to 5 job and rely heavily on the gig economy. The gig economy came to a standstill under lockdown.
The R300 million Pesp fund started taking applicants from October. The NAC was to disburse the money through two funding streams – R100m to enable job retention and R200m for work opportunities within the arts.
Since then, the council has suspended its chief financial officer, Clifton Changfoot, and chief executive Rosemary Mangope, pending an investigation into the mishandling of the funds which resulted in applicants not receiving the money promised to them.
In a radio interview, Sithole said the NAC appointed industry experts outside the council to go through the applications.
He said there were many applications that were turned down, leaving the council with 1 374 in total.
“What is worrying is that the industry is huge. We should be getting hundreds of thousands of applications, which means that we have not created access to the people in the margins of our society, in the rural areas and townships where people know how to go to the internet, log on and complete a document and send it. We have not scratched the surface.”
Sithole said the stimulus programme was an anomaly as it was not part of the NAC mandate as it could have been given to anyone to administer.
“The money that Treasury gives to the NAC is not going to get us anywhere in the long run. I hope that when we, as the new council, begin to really do the work once we have dealt with this Pesp, we can really go and make a case.”
Sithole said part of the reason why the Pesp fund went over budget was because they underestimated the size of the industry.
“This industry is bigger than R300m, than R600m. This industry contributes R74 billion to the GDP annually and employs 1.3 million people.”
He said it was the 1.3 million people who needed to have applied but there had been a lack of access.
Sithole said the new council had started distributing funds to the applicants who had applied, but had to revise the funding level from what was previously approved to the beneficiaries.
“We have paid so far R29m to 277 beneficiaries but that is not enough.
“We have had to reissue new letters of grants, and that alone is a process, for people to reload their projects and sign the contracts.”
Sithole said the council had to ensure that management and the project team worked much faster to ensure the contracts were in order.
He said there was an investigation into the alleged mismanagement of funds.
“We are aligned with the industry. The frustration that they are showing is the frustration that we have had when we started (as council). We believe we are now turning the corner because we have come to grasp what the problems are and we have come up with solutions,” he said.
The council will give a briefing on the developments of the fund on Friday.
The Star