No Cheers for Creative Arts and Culture in 2020 Budget
23 November 2019
Ghana’s governments continue to toy with the demands of the creative arts stakeholders. The lack of support for the arts has historically opened the caskets of governments’ hypocrisy. Lack of support for the arts and culture is a reason for fury and distress. Despite unbridled enthusiasm publicized by creatives through workshops, lectures, demonstrations, and appeals to the government, the industry keeps on breaking rock, shifting rock.
The creative industry encompasses performing arts, visual arts, motion pictures, museums, photography, fashion design, publishing, and more. A creative economy is vital for keeping cultural significance alive – it maintains cultural identity and shares that identity via tourism projects.
Despite its economic giants, Ghana’s creative economy stays the most underappreciated economic driver in the country. This categorical assertion is buttressed by the recent Akufo-Addo-led government’s Budget Statement and Economic Policy for 2020 presented by the Finance Minister, Hon. Ken Ofori Atta. The somewhat “Nkosuo ne nkabom” budget woefully failed to put broad smiles on the faces of the creatives. There is no reason to be cheerful!
As governments budgets continue to leave the creative arts out in the cold, as more talented and brilliant creatives are becoming wasting asset, as creative producers and directors find it cumbersome in securing credit facility for their productions, as more graduates churned out from the School of Performing Arts (Legon), University of Cape Coast’s Theatre and Film Studies Department, University of Education’s School of Creative Arts, KNUST’s Centre for Cultural and African Studies, NAFTI, and more, continually wallow in a labyrinthine maze of unemployment amidst hopelessness future painted in their faces, how can the creatives have cheers? Governments continue to dole out terrifying amounts of dollars to the sports sector and neglect the creative arts. Even sad, the government’s budget allocation for the Ministry of Tourism, Arts, and Culture only details tourism projects and completely ignores the creative arts and culture.
It is increasingly worrying that uninformed Ghanaians and authorities have packaged the creative arts industry as fantasy and selling it as reality. Spending on the arts makes big money. So why pay lip service to the creative economy?
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