Grant Pascoe
The battle over arts funding in the Western Cape is being fought in the media, but it is less about saving artists and more about politics. Ricardo Mackenzie, the Western Cape MEC for Cultural Affairs and Sport, has launched loud attacks on national minister Gayton McKenzie for withdrawing funding from major festivals. Yet his outrage is hollow, because the DA-led provincial government has been cutting and neglecting grassroots arts for years.
Mackenzie claims it is “unconscionable” that national government is punishing the province by pulling support from cultural events. But his own department gives those same festivals only crumbs. Suidoosterfees, the Klein Karoo Nasionale Kunstefees and the Cape Town Carnival each receive R250,000 a year from the province. The Prince Albert Journey to Jazz festival was allocated R170,500 in 2023/24. Festivals rooted in working-class and rural communities, such as the Mitchells Plain Festival and the Maynardville Festival, are left with little or no support. These amounts do not put food on the table for thousands of households, as Mackenzie claims.
Elite Festivals Feast, Community Arts Starve
At the same time, elite Cape Town institutions continue to receive the lion’s share of provincial funding. The Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra and Cape Town Opera each secured between R1 million and R1.5 million in recent years. The Baxter Theatre and Jazzart Dance Theatre also receive allocations in the R800,000 to R1 million range. In other words, while community festivals struggle to survive on token grants, the cultural establishment in the city bowl is kept alive with large, steady transfers.
For years, the DA has treated festivals as photo opportunities and branding exercises. Politicians arrive for the cameras, take the credit and leave once the lights go down. What they have not done is build real, long-term funding systems that sustain artists in townships, rural areas and working-class communities.
Ricardo Mackenzie’s attacks on Gayton McKenzie are opportunistic. This is not about saving artists. It is about the DA defending its own image while grassroots arts and culture in the Western Cape continue to be underfunded
