House Chairperson
Minister of Sport, Arts and Culture, Hon Gayton McKenzie
Ministers and Deputy Ministers present
Chairperson of the Portfolio Committee, Hon Joe McGluwa
Honourable Members
Director-General Khumalo and the DSAC executive team
Distinguished Guests, Members of the Media|
Ladies and Gentlemen
Honourable House Chairperson, the Minister has set out the strategic frame for this Department. My role today is to speak to the work that takes that frame and turns it into change – in classrooms and community halls, in archives and libraries, in language and on playing fields. This is the work that does not always make headlines, but it is the work that touches the most lives.
Sport for Every Child
You cannot build a winning nation at the top if the foundation is hollow. Through the mass participation and sport development conditional grant of R652.6 million, we are reaching every province, every district, and every quintile of school. Five thousand learners compete at the National School Sport Championships. Equipment and attire will reach hubs, clubs, and schools that have never been resourced before. We thank FNB for their significant investment in school sport leagues, which represents exactly the kind of partnership between public ambition and private commitment that this portfolio is becoming known for.
To make sure that no talented young person is excluded from sport because there is nowhere to play, we are this year targeting 100 new outdoor gyms and 50 combi courts in communities across the country, building on the 70 outdoor gyms (33 of which have been completed) and 31 combi courts (17 of which have been completed) delivered in the last financial year, which reached 53 municipalities. These facilities are not luxuries. They are the difference between a child finding her talent and never knowing it existed.
Women in the Arts and Culture Economy
This year, 2026/27, marks the 70th anniversary of the Women’s March of 1956. We honour that legacy not with commemoration alone, but with action. We are accelerating and expanding the Department’s Women Development Programme through targeted partnerships, dialogues, exposure platforms, and economic empowerment opportunities.
Thirty percent of Mzansi Golden Economy and Presidential Employment Stimulus Programme funds have been targeted to benefit women practitioners. Fifty percent of young people recruited into our two flagship programmes – the Young Creatives Programme under the National Youth Service, and the Debut Fund Programme for youth entrepreneurship – are young women. We have also recognised female artists through the National Arts and Culture Awards, affirming their equal contribution to this sector.
This work is not statistical. It is structural. We are removing the specific barriers that women in the creative industries continue to face, and we are doing so through partnership, experimentation, and consistent participation by women practitioners themselves.
Stories, Books, and Languages
A nation that does not read in its own languages is a nation that has surrendered part of itself. The Mzansi Book Fair is being launched this year as our commitment to literary creation – building a market for South African stories told in South African voices, including in Khwedam, Nama, Khoi, San, and South African Sign Language.
The DSAC Publishing Hub has produced 91 works to date, 12 of which are proudly in Braille. The Art Bank has acquired 180 works in the last year, growing a national collection that now spans 850 artworks from 522 visual artists. These are not symbolic numbers. Each work funded is a livelihood supported, a story told, a piece of South Africa preserved.
On languages: the National Language Summit in March 2026 produced the ||nwa (Cikwa) Declaration and established a National Task Team to drive a unified language policy framework. Four Human Language Technology projects are being supported across all eleven official languages, including South African Sign Language.
We are also consulting on the Draft Use of Official Languages Amendment Bill. Following the inclusion of South African Sign Language in the Constitution as our twelfth official language in 2023, we are now bringing legislation into line. Initial consultations took place in March 2026, and have continued in May. A technical task team is being appointed to consolidate inputs and finalise the Bill. Language is not a soft priority – it is the infrastructure through which every other priority reaches people.
Archives and Oral History
The memory of a nation lives in its archives. The 2025 Annual Archives Awareness Week was hosted in Mpumalanga in May 2025, under the theme “Digital Footprints: Archives and Records Management in the Digital Era,” and brought together 1,100 participants. The 22nd Annual National Oral History Conference followed in Polokwane in October 2025, continuing the work of recording the stories of those whose voices were silenced by history.
The National Archives and Records Service faces real infrastructure challenges – ageing facilities, deferred maintenance, and constrained storage capacity. We are addressing these through the HVAC project being implemented with the Department of Public Works and Infrastructure, which will deliver mobile shelving for an additional twenty percent storage capacity. A Cabinet Memorandum on long-term archival infrastructure is under review, and engagement is ongoing with National Treasury on off-site storage solutions.
Libraries as the Doorway to Knowledge
Programme 4 transfers R1.718 billion to provinces this year to support community library services. Eighteen new and upgraded library facilities will come on stream during 2026/27. A library in a community is not a building – it is an open door for a child whose home cannot afford books, for an unemployed adult looking to reskill, for an older person finding history in print. Libraries are where the future of this country is being quietly built, page by page.
Gender-Based Violence and Social Cohesion
This Department continues to drive the Golekane campaign – our contribution to the national fight against gender-based violence and femicide. Sport, arts and culture reach into communities in ways that prescriptive interventions cannot. We use that reach. From stadium activations to community theatre, from artist-led campaigns to school-based programmes, we are putting the message of zero tolerance into the spaces where it must be heard.
We continue to support the National Dialogue process and the broader work of social cohesion. South Africa’s diversity is a strength only when we keep doing the work of holding it together. That work happens through stories, through shared spaces, through the games our children play together, and through the ancestors we honour together.
In Closing
Honourable Members, the budget the Minister and I are tabling today is more than a financial instrument. It is a statement of priorities. The priority I want this House to hear from me today is this: the people whose lives this Department changes are most often invisible to the headlines – the schoolgirl who plays her first organised match, the language activist preserving N|uu, the archivist saving a struggle interview from decay, the female creative receiving her first grant.
They are why this work matters. They are why we will not slow down.
I deliver these remarks in support of the adoption of Budget Vote 37, and I thank you, Chairperson.
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