Reading election manifestos is dispiriting at the best of times. The media obviously take the greatest delight in slating the ruling party, because it’s easiest to check whether their promises from last time were kept. But all the parties seem to have their sales pitches written by graduates of the same University of Weasel Words.
They all contain slogans nobody could possibly disagree with (“End crime!” “End loadshedding!”). They all use the same linguistic tricks: crammed with passives without an actor (“X should be done…”; “X is needed…”). All of them focus on the “What”, with longwinded waffleabout the “How?”, if it’s discussed at all. Parties on the populist side specialise in authoritarian fiats (“There shall be…”). Parties on the right specialise in promising the impossible: less regulation and fewer taxes when the new measures “we will ensure” could only be implemented through regulation and will need to be funded somehow.
But reading how the manifestos propose to handle arts and culture – and especially music – is the most dispiriting task of all.
So far, I’ve seen (in no particular order) the Rise Mzantsi People’s Manifesto, the DA’s Rescue Plan, the Change Starts Now document, and the manifestos of ActionSA (“Let’s Fix South Africa“), the ANC and the EFF. (A few biggish players (IFP, Good Party) are still to launch their policy plans.) All the documents contain proposals for infrastructural improvement that will, as a side-effect , benefit the arts as they will other sectors. But concrete, targeted, informed cultural policies? Not so much.
Bottom of the class by a long way is the DA. The party’s Blue Saviour narrative promises to “rescue South Africa” from a range of ills – although you’re on your own with poverty and inequality, because from those all they promise is to “enable people to rescue themselves”. But there’s no mention of arts, culture or heritage policy. The closest they get is to complain, in a testing-obsessed section on education, that “tuition time is constantly sacrificed to other priorities, including (…) choir practice…” There will be no singing in schools on their watch.
Almost as visionless about the arts is the “Charter” of Roger Jardine’s Change Starts Now movement – surprising (or perhaps not) from a former D-G of the old DAC. There’s a commonplace generality about children getting “all the education and training necessary to meet all their potential”, and maybe the promised “mini-Change Charters” to come will say more. The absence of cultural policies is a pity, though, because this is the only smaller party manifesto with a concrete proposal for how improvements can be funded, via a short-term Reconstruction Tax.
Barely scraping in above those two is Action SA, with a line about how “all children should have access to a range of well-resourced extracurricular activities (…) such as sport, drama and art”. But from the private-sector focus of the rest of the document it looks like that’ll only happen if business stumps up the cash – and he who pays the piper…
The ANC makes the arts part of Priority Five out of six: defend democracy and advance freedom. That’s a progressive placement, acknowledging that human creativity has a bigger place and role than simply as a money-making commodity. But the generalised framing is highly instrumental: “Reinforce the contribution of arts, heritage, languages, culture, sport and the creative sector more generally to nation-building, social cohesion and national development”. Each of the ANC’s six priorities has both a general framing and a more detailed subsequent section, but, disappointingly – and in contrast to some other sections – on the arts the follow-up really doesn’t add much. That’s a step down from the last national elections, when the ANC manifesto had a detailed chapter on the creative industries (see https://sisgwenjazz.wordpress.com/2019/01/20/elections-culture-commoditisation-made-manifesto/) : heavily global market-focused, but at least it was there.
It’s left to Songezo Zibi’s Rise Mzantsi to explicitly discuss the creative economy, although often tightly linked to tourism, much as the ANC manifesto treated it in 2019. The party does, however, promise to “leverage public and private investment in community arts and sports infrastructure and skills, to build a vibrant amateur and professional arts sector. We will also encourage and assist marquee arts productions (huh?) that promote South African arts, tourism and national culture”.
Rise Mzantsi notes that the communities it talked to, unsurprisingly, linked loss of hope to the loss of community cultural infrastructure, but doesn’t make as much of that link as it might. And there’s a lovely line about “Africa-centred education (…) imagining African futures…” which could definitely cue some more concrete discussion of restoring arts education in state schools, but doesn’t. Left hanging like that, it seems just another slogan with high symbolic but minimal concrete value, alongside “end blue-light brigades”.
Top of the class, just like last time (but with some massive caveats) comes the EFF, whose manifesto has a long chapter on arts and culture and extensive consideration of the creative pipeline from the education chapter too.
It’s the only party to acknowledge arts and music education as having not only economic but human value: “to improve cognitive skills and stimulate learners.” It’s the only party to acknowledge the importance of IP and the laws around it to the arts – other parties might as well still be living in the pre-digital age. It deals with the concrete problems artists are facing now: the high cost of instruments; the lack of arts equipment and teachers in schools; the inability of skilled arts veterans to secure teaching posts because they lack formal qualifications; the lack of any labour protections for the majority of freelance arts practitioners.
However, there are several big buts. First, almost all of this is expressed as orders from above, such as “every school will have one arts and culture teacher per grade by 2025.” There is no consideration of how to get there, or of the budget, curriculum and logistical adjustments this will require. As in other manifestos, “what” trumps “how”.
Second, some of it is absurdly specific – “one monthly (arts) festival in each district municipality” – where the cultural needs of communities are often much more locality-specific than this, and the central imposition of one-size-fits-all policies, events and hard infrastructure may not be at all what is needed.
Third, some of it is just plain wrong. Local content music quotas are, unarguably, a good thing. But setting those quotas too high – 85% or 90% is proposed in some broadcasting contexts – subverts their value and renders them almost un-implementable, particularly in today’s multi-channel digital music consumption world. (see https://sisgwenjazz.wordpress.com/2016/05/12/ninety-percent-local-music-on-sabc-too-little-context-too-big-a-number/)As the Motsoeneng mess illustrated, it discredits an otherwise very useful measure.
The EFF, alone among the parties so far, has listened in detail to what cultural practitioners, including teachers, are saying. It genuinely knows what today’s problems are. For that, it deserves praise. But any party that translates diverse and nuanced needs into a fixed set of centralised and authoritarian orders is also signalling that it may be rather less likely to carry on listening should it ever achieve power.
sisgwenjazz 