27 May 2026

The ANC Study Group on Sports, Arts, and Culture has welcomed the Minister’s decision to dissolve the Board of the National Arts Council (NAC), describing it as a necessary and long-overdue intervention. Acting under Section 5(5) of the NAC Act, the Minister’s move to disband the Board has been framed by the Study Group as a critical “system reset” one demanded by years of institutional dysfunction, unresolved labour disputes, and a pattern of fiscal recklessness that saw public funds spent on luxury mobile devices and inflated external recruitment costs, even as the Board claimed budgetary constraints.

Yet, the Study Group is clear that welcoming the disbandment does not mean endorsing the silence around its causes. The Study Group has raised pointed concerns that the Minister’s executive action risks functioning as a smokescreen in which board members were hand-picked on the basis of political alignment and factional loyalty, rather than demonstrated expertise in public finance, labour relations, or the creative economy. It is this culture, the Study Group argues, that planted the seeds of the NAC’s collapse.

Compounding the governance failures at the NAC is a far more serious allegation, one that strikes at the integrity of the state’s flagship cultural funding instrument. The Study Group has levelled grave charges against the Ministerially appointed Mzansi Golden Economy (MGE) Adjudication Panel, accusing it of bypassing National Treasury guidelines and evading parliamentary oversight in order to direct portions of the R110-million MGE fund to non-compliant, deregistered, and fraudulent “ghost companies.” Genuine, tax-compliant, grassroots artists the very people the MGE was designed to uplift have been left without support while public resources have allegedly been siphoned to politically connected entities. This is not an administrative failure. It is, in the Study Group’s assessment, a potential criminal misappropriation of public funds.

In response, the Study Group has issued three non-negotiable demands. First, it calls for an immediate freeze on all 2026/27 MGE funding allocations, pending an independent forensic audit to trace irregular disbursements and recover funds paid to fraudulent beneficiaries. Second, it demands that members of the MGE Adjudication Panel together with any complicit departmental officials be referred for criminal investigation to the Hawks and the Special Investigating Unit under PRECCA. Third, and perhaps most structurally significant, the Study Group demands an end to closed-door appointment processes, insisting that all future selections for the NAC Board and MGE funding panels be subjected to open, transparent, and publicly accountable parliamentary vetting.

These demands are not merely procedural. They reflect the ANC’s Renewal Agenda and its commitment to constructing a capable, developmental state that serves all South Africans particularly the working-class youth and emerging artists who constitute the lifeblood of this country’s cultural economy. Public wealth must be directed by merit, accountability, and democratic oversight not by the patronage networks of a sitting Minister. 

The Study Group has made its position unequivocal that the era of political cronyism dressed up as cultural development is over.

Issued by the Whip of the ANC Study Group on Sport, Arts and Culture, Cde Inathi Mbiyo

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Cde: Hlengiwe Hadebe
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