The National Arts Festival's Board has made an urgent appeal to the National Lottery Distribution Trust Fund (NLDTF) to not cut funding to Arts and Culture as government has suggested.
The National Arts Festival's Board has made an urgent appeal to the National Lottery Distribution Trust Fund (NLDTF) to not cut funding to Arts and Culture as government has suggested.
National Arts Festival CEO Tony Lankester said the proposed changes would be devastating and result in the closure of numerous organisations and important projects and lead to wide-scale job losses in the sector.
The Department of Trade and Industry 1 October published for public comment draft regulations that would govern the National Lottery Board (NLB) and the way it distributes funds that would see Arts and Culture getting less funding in favour of Sports and Charities.
The proposed amendments would see the Charities sector receiving 47% of the total pool, up from 45%, and Sport and Recreation receiving an increased portion – from 22% to 30%.
The Arts, Culture and National Heritage Sector, meanwhile, would see its share reduce from 28% to 20% – a cut of nearly one-third.
"These are dramatic changes to the status quo and, in our view, unjustifiable. It would, effectively, mean a cut to arts funding from around R560m a year to about R400m a year," Lankester said.
In an emailed response to Grocott's Mail Lankester said, "While they may not have a direct or significant impact on the Festival’s funding base, they will, in their present form, have a big effect on the arts sector as a whole."
Lankester said the NAF has been a beneficiary of lottery funds since 2002, but it is not dependent solely on those funds as it has a wide-range of sponsors and funders, including Standard Bank and the Department of Arts and Culture.
"We are currently in discussions about a 2015 grant from the Lottery. It's the kind of discussion we have with them each year, and have done since 2002. That's completely separate from the current debate around allocations contained in the draft regulations," he said.
According to Lankester, if no Lottery funding were forthcoming the Festival would continue, but may need to be scaled down in some areas.
Reducing the funding by one-third would accelerate the closure of arts-related organisations, meaning their work would stop and staff would be retrenched, The NAF board has made an urgent submission to the Lottery with their budget proposal as follows: Charitable expenditure: 47%; Sports and Recreation: 25%; Arts, Culture and National Heritage: 25% and Miscellaneous: 3%.
The submission also outlined the ways the Festival creates jobs:
*Artists receive exposure and income from ticket sales
*Companies staging the work derive secondary funding from other sources
*Directors, writers, choreographers, musicians and other creative people receive income
*Venue owners receive rental income
*Caterers that sell food and beverages
*Transport companies that bring audiences and crews to Festival
*Local printing companies that produce flyers/posters
*A myriad other small businesses and artisans, including security firms, cleaning companies, sound and lighting hire firms, set constructors, make up artists, song writers etc, are all among those sectors of society that directly earn income from Festival.
The Festival is a significant driver of the economy of the City of Grahamstown and the Eastern Cape Province contributing an estimated R350m to its economy.
