The commissioner for Arts & Culture, Ekiti State, Prof Ojo Bakare Rasaki, and Jahman Anikulapo reminisced on the reason for the stall of the National Endowment Funds for the Arts.
In the Holding Talks interview session, the commissioner, Bakare, earlier revealed that Ekiti State had entrenched in its 2023 budget an endowment fund for the state’s creative sector, which can provide creatives grants, loans and other intervention funds to stage plays, produce films among all else in the sector.
He said the Ekiti example can be replicated at the national level, where the struggle for the provision of an Endowment Fund has been stalled for decades.
Since the establishment of the 1991 Act for the provision of a National Endowment Fund for the Arts in Nigeria, decade-ly discusses towards the achievement of the fund have yielded no results.
Bakare who served on the committee for the Endowment Fund for the Arts in 2018 described it as fruitless. This situation, he blamed on tussle amongst artistic associations on which group is the lead the push for the fund.
“The document for the Art Endowment has been worked on to the point of it just being consented to. It is, we, in the Art House and National Association of Nigerian Theatre Arts Practitioners (NANTAP) and others that bungled it.
“That is because we had so many organizations, and they all had ideas of which association is to push for the funds. Efforts to revisit the document has not yielded results for decades,” lamented Rasaki.
Corroborating Rasaki’s testament, Culture Advocate and ex-editor Guardian Newspaper, Jahman Anikulapo, noted that during the era of the more cultural friendly Minister of Information Ojo Maduekwe, who ‘had the ear of the president’ disunited voices amongst the artistes undermined the achievement of the fund.
Likewise, the absence of authentic artistes in public and civil service offices to whom they can leverage on for its realization.
“Some of us artists were asking for other things. We tried the coalition of Nigerian artistes but that didn’t work. Today, all our brother artistes in the civil service who we thought to leverage on have retired. None that we have now in the sector are artistes.”
He, however, believes that the alternative of developing state cultural policies already provided for by the Nigerian Constitution, offers the best solution.
“I say, we insist that every state should have its own cultural policy, that way we don’t need government in our space, because the cultural policy is provisioned for in the law,” concluded Anikulapo.
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