Government should get rid of dead wood in national arts administration as well as set aside a substantive fund to support the arts sector in the country, stakeholders have said.
These issues, among others, were raised at an arts meeting that was held under the banner Cabinet Watch, which was attended by civic leaders, artistes of different genres and the media in Harare recently.
Contributing to the discussion during the event hosted by Arts Innovation Trust (AIT) in partnership with Jive Zimbabwe, Nhimbe Trust director Josh Nyapimbi said instead of changing ministers or creating a separate arts ministry, the focus should be shifted towards the long-serving, but ineffective leaders in state institutions.
“Surely all the ministers that have been appointed in the past cannot be that bad, but who is letting them down?” queried Nyapimbi.
“I think we need to have a scientific diagnosis of the entire value chain and the architecture of this ministry because we just need the whole infrastructure to change from the principal directors as they have failed.”
Nyapimbi, who pinpointed National Arts Council of Zimbabwe (NACZ) director Nicholas Moyo and Culture and Heritage ministry principal director Paul Damasane as “part of the hardware in the ministry”, called for a complete overhaul of the entire value chain.
“We can get the best minister from the President, but he is likely to be messed up by those two guys.
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“While we look at the big picture of the minister, let us look also at the people who have become part of the hardware in the ministry and would frustrate the cause of a good minister.”
Veteran actor Stephen Chigorimbo called for full incorporation of arts into government business agenda.
“Arts is the biggest, most important business in any country and when ED [President-elect Emmerson Mnangagwa] says Zimbabwe is open for business, we are the ones who go in front because we are bringing real business and employment to every sector,” said Chigorimbo, adding that there was need to set aside a fund in the fiscal policy.
“We also need an institution to protect the arts and government should ensure that every time there is a certain amount on the fiscus set aside for that.”
Chigorimbo also mooted prefixing the word “command” to the arts and culture fund idea to try and catch government’s attention as has been done in other sectors.
However, if government did not heed the call by creatives, then neo-colonialism through cultural erosion would continue according to Savanna Trust director Daniel Maphosa.
“We do not need to mortgage our arts and culture to foreign donors whose money comes with strings, where you first have to see that you promote the culture of the assisting country. By doing that we are negating our own arts and culture and colonialism will continue,” he said.
Maphosa took a dig at the NACZ, which he blamed for focusing solely on regulating arts and collecting money from artistes, while shunning their mandate of sourcing funding for the arts and research so that they could efficiently advise government.
Meanwhile, Cabinet Watch event coordinator Benjamin Nyandoro expressed appreciation for the stakeholders that honoured the invitation to the event, which was the first phase of an ongoing series aimed at influencing the appointment of a good arts minister as well as the revamp of the arts policies in the country.
“We are going to prepare a very consolidated document from the issues that we have submitted at this particular event and then we will present the paper to stakeholders so that the paper participates in the decision-making process,” said Nyandoro.
The second phase will be advocacy and taking the issues to relevant authorities so they can incorporate them in government while the third phase is monitoring implementation and performance.
