Statement by Brett Herron, GOOD Secretary General and member of the Western Cape Provincial Parliament
16 August 2021
Government budgets do more than present dry financial information. In the process of disclosing a State or Department’s tangible spending priorities critical intangible indicators of morality and integrity are revealed.
Hidden in the fine print of the City of Cape Town’s Adjustment Budget, to be tabled on Thursday, is a proposal to spend R7.57m on the Mayoral Art Collection.
“I have written to the City Manager, the City of Cape Town’s Accounting Officer, to ask for an explanation,” said GOOD Secretary-General Brett Herron.
“This type of budgeting exposes the lie that clean or unqualified audits necessarily equate to good government. Audit outcomes reveal whether or not governments have stuck to the rules, but are silent on the choices governments make. They are silent when governments fail needy communities,” said GOOD Secretary-General Brett Herron.
The R7.57m that Cape Town intends spending on the Mayoral Art Collection is made up of R7m that was meant to be spent in the last financial year, topped up by an additional R570 000 in “new” funds. According to the budget, the R7m couldn’t be spent in the last financial year due to “supply constraints”.
The funding has been re-purposed from the Social Development and Early Childhood Development Department’s budget. This is the department responsible for assisting the most vulnerable Capetonians, including the homeless and hungry.
“If the money should have been spent last year in support of struggling artists severely impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic, why did the City leave them high and dry in the industry’s most difficult year of all time? How could there have been supply constraints at a time artists were desperate to work?
“If this is not a programme to support local, emerging or struggling artists, then why is the Social Development Department procuring art instead of allocating the funding to feeding the hungry or assisting the homeless?”
Herron also raised questions about procurement: What process was used to procure this art, and how do we know that the art is worth the money?