SOUTH AFRICA’S NATIONAL ARTS COUNCIL RESTORED AFTER COURT BLOCKS MINISTER’S DISSOLUTION
Eleven council members walked back into their posts this week after a Pretoria court stopped Arts, Sport and Culture Minister Gayton McKenzie from disbanding them. Judge A Millar, sitting in the Gauteng Division of the High Court, suspended the dissolution order McKenzie had issued on 25 May and barred him from taking any further steps to replace the council while the underlying legality of his action is reviewed.
“There is no Council,” Millar wrote in the judgment. “There needs to be a Council for the statutory scheme to operate.”
The reinstatement is interim. A full hearing will ultimately decide whether McKenzie’s original grounds for dissolving the council were justified.
The sequence of events that brought the matter to court began in April, when McKenzie wrote to the National Arts Council asking it to convene urgently over a labour dispute about performance bonuses stretching back to the 2019/20 financial year. The council scheduled a special meeting for 29 May to take up the matter. Four days before that meeting was set to occur, McKenzie dissolved the council, citing the delay in addressing the bonus issue alongside unspecified “credible information” about procurement decisions and what he described as a “broader breakdown in institutional leadership and governance.”
Millar found this reasoning insufficient to justify the timing. The council had not yet been given the chance to address the very issue the Minister himself had flagged as urgent, making it unreasonable to dissolve it days before the scheduled meeting. The judge stopped short of ruling on whether McKenzie’s broader governance concerns held merit; that question waits for the full review. For the purposes of the interim order, the logic did not stand.
McKenzie had argued in his court papers that appointing a new council would take more than six months and that the applicants’ case therefore lacked urgency. Millar inverted the argument: a six-month vacancy at the head of a statutory body was itself evidence of the harm the council members stood to suffer, and why the balance of convenience favored reinstating them rather than leaving the institution without governance during the review. The court excused the Minister’s late filing of opposing papers, attributed to overseas commitments including the FIFA World Cup and the Commonwealth Games.
Meanwhile, the NAC had been operating under its Chief Executive Officer alone since the dissolution. The judgment makes clear that the CEO has no independent authority to make policy decisions and remains accountable to the council under the governing Act. Reinstatement restores the governance structure Parliament established for the institution.
The NAC’s board welcomed the ruling as “an affirmation of lawful governance, institutional accountability and the proper stewardship of public resources.” The board stressed that the proceedings had never centered on individuals or positions but on protecting the statutory framework Parliament created for the council. Its immediate priority, the board said, was to resume oversight of the institution, and it expressed willingness to work with McKenzie and the department going forward.
Costs of the interim application, including the fees of two counsel, were awarded against the Minister. Whether McKenzie’s original decision to dissolve the council was lawful at all remains an open question, one the full review has yet to answer.