Programme Director
Chairpersons and Members of Councils that we are today inaugurating
The Director General of the Department of Arts and Culture, Mr Sibusiso Xaba
The CEOs of our Institutions
Honoured guests
Ladies and gentlemen
I take this opportunity to congratulate all of you for having been nominated to serve on the various Councils of our Heritage Institutions.
I thank you sincerely for agreeing to serve your country and its people in this capacity.
I also take this opportunity to thank the Chairpersons and all the Council Members who served before you.
I trust that some of those who served before, have been nominated to serve on the new Councils to ensure continuity.
Programme director, today marks an important milestone in our ongoing endeavor to strengthen the capacity of the Department of Arts and Culture and its institutions to deliver on their mandate.
The inauguration of the new Councils of the Voortrekker Museum, the Luthuli Museum, the Afrikaans Taal Museum, the William Humphery’s Art Gallery, the War Museum of the Boer Republics and the National English Literary Museum, will strengthen our efforts to preserve our country’s rich and diverse cultural heritage.
We thank the panels as well as all the officials that made it possible for us to be able to inaugurate these Councils.
Programme director, I wish to say to all new Council Members; you have our support.
We have no doubt that you will execute your tasks in a diligent and professional manner; inspired only by your desire to contribute to the development and preservation of our heritage for the benefit of present and future generations.
Learning from the life of our icon Nelson Mandela, whose 93rd birthday we will celebrate next week on the 18th of July, we must do our work in a manner that does not seek personal glory and enrichment but in a manner that benefits all the people of our country.
Programme director, the inauguration of these Councils takes place at a time when we have begun a process of repositioning the Department of Arts and Culture and all its institutions.
This repositioning was made necessary by the resolutions of our National Consultative Summit on the role of the Arts, Culture and Heritage sector in the economy, held in April this year.
Guided by the resolutions of this summit, the Department and its institutions will from now on play a leading role in unleashing the potential of the cultural and creative industries to contribute to the goals of the New Growth Path, in particular the goals of promoting economic growth and job creation.
As we reposition the Department we will not abandon the strategic role it continues to play in promoting social cohesion, nation building and a common nationhood.
This we will do because of our understanding that our culture and heritage are key to nation building and social cohesion and that these are important ingredients in creating a climate of social stability and economic prosperity.
Indeed it is our view that the arts, culture and heritage sector is both of tangible and of intangible value.
We also believe that heritage institutions have a critical role to play in preserving our heritage, contributing to social cohesion and nation building as well as the economic advancement of our society.
In line with our desire to contribute to the New Growth Path we expect all our institutions develop clear programmes with clearly defined outcomes and deliverables that will assist the Department of Arts and Culture to achieve this strategic objective.
We will rely on the Councils to ensure that the programmes run by all our heritage institutions contribute directly to the path we have crafted for our sector, as guided by the resolutions of our Summit in April this year.
We also expect our institutions to come up with programmes that will make them accessible to all the people of South Africa.
Equally, through their programmes, our heritage institutions must serve as centers of lifelong learning for both young and old, black and white.
Heritage Institutions should also involve communities in the conceptualisation and planning of their exhibitions in order to close the gap between communities and heritage institutions.
Involving communities will ensure that the stories that are told and exhibited in our institutions are a true reflection of the experiences of the communities affected.
Through their programmes our institutions must also contribute to ongoing efforts to foster a common national identity, national healing, nation building and social cohesion.
Our institutions must be at the forefront of spreading the message that: what unites us as a nation far outweighs that which divides us. We are a nation united in its diversity.
Our heritage institutions must assist us to defeat the scourge of racism, xenophobia and related intolerances.
They must instill in our communities the values of equality, human dignity and of Ubuntu which form the basis of our democratic Constitution.
Council members, we look up to you to ensure that our institutions deliver on all of these things.
In this regard, we urge you to be impatient and intolerant to non-performance, under-performance and mal-performance.
For our part as the Department of Arts and Culture, we pledge to support and work together with all the Councils as they execute their mandate.
In particular we will strive for a closer and more direct working relationship between the department and the Councils.
Once more congratulations to all the Council members. We wish you well in your work.
We count on you to put your collective shoulder to the wheel as we together preserve our heritage which is an integral part of our national assets.
Thank you.
Source: Department Arts and Culture
