OP-ED Our sector does not lack imagination

After 15 years running Music Exchange and watching hundreds of “cultural economy” gatherings, #SACOConf2025 (this week in Cape Town 4 & 5 Nov) made something painfully clear: we are drowning in talk that refuses to become action. Artists don’t need more academic syntax. We need levers. We need enforcement. We need money to move differently.

Conferences are theatre. I know this. I’ve produced them. I’ve lived inside the mechanics. Panels balloon. People read into laptops. Everyone “shares reflections.” Everyone claps. Nothing changes on Monday.

And you could feel it at SACO this week.
The artists were on fire.
The system remained frozen.

What exhausted me was not the passion in the room. It was the absence of outcomes.

Because here is the truth we don’t want to say out loud:

The creative sector in South Africa is not failing because of a lack of ideas. It is failing because our governance architecture does not allow ideas to turn into contracts, budgets, and enforceable mechanisms.

We keep treating gatekeeping as a vibe issue. A moral argument.
It is not.
Gatekeeping is a design issue.

If the gate has no criteria, no timeline, no accountable owner, and no audited flow — the “gate” is actually just a bottleneck masquerading as a filter.

Kurt Lewin said this in the 40s. It’s not new.
Gatekeepers are not always villains.
The problem is WHO controls the gate, WHO sets the rules, WHAT the flow criteria are, and WHEN it gets reviewed.

Right now we have arbitrary gates — run by individuals, moods, and politics.
We need designed gates — run by systems.

So let me say this directly, as someone who has been in the trenches 15+ years:

Artists, stop waiting for institutions to reform themselves.
Force them into the bargaining table.

How?

Not by “raising awareness.”
Not by another panel.

By demanding 5 outcome levers any functioning sector has:

1) Time-bound decisions

If an application is not adjudicated in 60 days, it auto-escalates.
Delay is a hidden form of denial.

2) Transparent scoring criteria

Publish the scoring rubric BEFORE applications open.
This is basic corporate procurement. Why not arts?

3) Public dashboards of disbursement

If DSAC, or SABC, or NFVF spend R20m — we should see who got what.
Every quarter. Public. Like IFRS reporting.

4) Standard market contracts

One page. Standardised.
You don’t reinvent a contract every time in banking. Why in culture?

5) Clawback for non-delivery

If funded entities don’t deliver, money returns to the pool.
This stops the recycling of “usual suspects.”

None of this requires a panel.

It requires political will.
And pressure.
And collective leverage from artists who stop begging for inclusion and instead demand governance parity.

Look at Sho Madjozi.
Her clarity on brand and setup is not accidental.
It is strategic governance of her own throughput.
40 cheap gigs is not equal to 8 good ones.
That is not theory. That is cashflow mathematics.

Nomfundo was right: exile today is not geographical — it is the slow erosion of identity in the name of palatability.

And Sello said the ugliest line of the conference:

“Under apartheid I was blocked. In the new government, I am still blocked.”

That is not poetic.
That is diagnosis.

And the remedy is not “better conversations.”
It is systemic accountability.

Artists: our job now is to stop accepting “consultation.”
We demand implementation.

So here’s my concrete call, in plain English:
Before the next SACO, one thing must change — not five, not twelve — just one:

Time-bound decisions for public funding.

We start with this because everything else cascades after it.

If we force the system to decide on time, we force it to show its bottlenecks, its biases, and its actual power pathways.

Once that is visible, the other reforms become inevitable.

Our sector does not lack imagination.
It lacks working gates.

Not gates that block.
Gates that let value flow.

Until then, we are talking to each other while the real decisions remain in back rooms, in inboxes, in opaque committees that cost artists time, currency, dignity.

We can do better.

And next time — if a panel is going nowhere — we can say so, in the room.

No more polite waffle shops.
We either produce outcomes — or we leave.

Artists have been too patient.

Now we engineer the gates.