Award-winning columnist, Bhekisisa Mncube, challenges President Cyril Ramaphosa to shake up the arts ministry following allegations that some R300-million in the Covid-19 stimulus package designed to retain and create jobs in the sport, arts and culture sectors has “disappeared”.

Sawubona Mongameli, His Excellency Cyril Matamela Ramaphosa. This week I intend to offend you; if given a chance, I will offend you again next week. I am on the offending mission not because we are no longer “political mates” united against the state capture apologists and committed to birthing a new society out of the ruins of the “nine lost years”. Perhaps the days of me plying my trade under the (dis)honourable title “Thuma Mina Public Defender Number 1” are long gone. Perhaps. Maybe it’s because I take my profession (a calling really) as a writer more seriously than being in the presidential good books.

As a writer, Mr President, I am the conscience of a nation. I represent through words and deeds what it means to be noble and of service to humanity. My role in society is not to be a loud siren for those holding public power but to offend them by speaking the truth, my truth. The creatives’ job is to hold a mirror up to society, even if no one likes the reflected image. To put it another way, “Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.”

Earlier this week, I told an attentive audience at the RapidLion Film Festival held at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg, that we cannot hold those in power to higher standards than we set for ourselves. I shared my belief that writers and film-makers have a moral responsibility

(an obligation, really) to tell uncomfortable truths about themselves and society. This became especially apparent as we watched the ground-breaking film #WeDoCare, written by Sechaba Morojele. It premiered at the festival. The film is about what you, Mr President, refer to as the second pandemic, i.e. gender-based violence, plaguing our society. It was inspired by a discarded woman’s shoe.

It thus traces the shoe's journey, finding its owner and embedding in her life story. It is more potent than all presidential summits against gender-based violence and femicide held and financed by your government.  Morojele redraws the contours of film-making and takes it to places it has rarely been before. He deserves the financial backing required to make this “experimental” film mainstream.  He probably won’t get it because the money from your government meant for the upliftment of the arts has a tendency to “disappear without anyone noticing”.

As I write, we, as the art community, have been taken for a ride by the Ministry of Sport, Arts and Culture. The ministry’s action in the recent past has been nothing short of shameful. At the last count, some R300-million of the Presidential Employment Stimulus Programme has “disappeared” from the agency of the department, the National Arts Council’s (NAC) coffers. This financial package (made up of taxpayers’ money) that the National Treasury made available for the art sector was meant to ameliorate the sector’s suffering because we can’t hold public “profitable” events due to the Covid-19 lockdown regulations. Yet, we have been left high and dry.

Thus we are left reeling from the unending spectre of corruption, ineptitude and lethargy. At best, it is a looting festival and a drama of political minnows using the department’s resources to feather their nest. At worst, it is a most unsettling scene unfolding in front of our eyes — the wilful decimation of the art industry. If you destroy the arts, you extinguish the fire that powers the soul of a nation. A nation that cannot see itself in the mirror through the arts has a dead soul.

Suppose the prevailing slide towards dysfunctionality of the art sector’s custodian continues unabated; we run the risk of birthing new art forms written and funded by rent-seekers and mobsters. If that happens, we might as well close shop as a democracy. The arts in a democracy, if you insist, are a sub-branch of a free press, except the arts allow for raw emotions and honest truth to reach millions more than any news bulletin.

Sad but true, Mr President, there’s a vacancy in the Ministry of Sport, Arts and Culture. In case you didn’t know, Minister Nathi Mthethwa is known as a Minister of Condolences and sometimes Congratulations in my industry. That is to say, Mthethwa is sleeping on the job. Fire him and to hell with the political fallout. Till next week my man. “Send me.”

This Letter to Mahlamba Ndlopfu is written by Bhekisisa Mncube a former senior Witness political journalist, the 2020 regional winner in the Opinion category of the Vodacom Journalist of the Year Award, and author of The Love Diary of a Zulu Boy, a memoir.

This opinion piece was first published in the Witness/News24.