LIYENABA ARTS NEWS/ AN SWAZILAND NEWSLETTER JANUARY 2012NEWS

LIYENABA ARTS NEWS/ ARTERIAL NETWORK SWAZILAND NEWSLETTER 

JANUARY 2012

CHAIRMAN REMARKS

Greetings in 2012! We hope the festive season was good for you and looking forward to a successful 2012 in the development of the arts. As an organization we have had a situation where people are asking the direction the arts industry is taking in Swaziland.  Usually we fail to give a satisfactory response because we are not sure whether we can safely say the arts industry exists in Swaziland or not. We do not have the instruments at our disposal to measure such. We do not know where we were in 2010 and what we achieved in 2011 as a sector?

Recently we have heard that artists are calling for unity in fighting exploitation. The reason they have advanced is that they are not paid accordingly for the work they do. Though I agree with them but I have a feeling that they need to engage with these issues more. Firstly it must be understood who are the artists who are in the creative industry and how can we tell that they are in that industry. Government has a duty to define each industry, regulate it and releases a gazette for the minimum wages/salaries paid. This issue will continue to be problematic if that has not been done. However government needs to be informed by the arts sector about how it operates so that she can start a process to regulate the industry. It is unfortunate that the arts and culture sector is not fully organized to inform government on what the industry is all about. So the organization of artists is highly needed to address such.

As an organization we have developed a model that needs to be adopted by each arts discipline where five stages are proposed. These are:  Celebrity/Socialite Status; Professional Level; Semi-Professional Level; Amateur Level and Developing Stages. In each stage we have provided elements that we can use as a base to define it. We just request you to assist in giving feedback to this model so that at least we use it to present our case in advocacy and lobbying initiatives.

Read the full Newsletter here.