A civil society request to access the inventory of all artworks housed within the Joburg Art Gallery (JAG) has been refused by the City of Joburg – prompting law firm Webber Wentzel to lodge a complaint with the Information Regulator.
The request, filed late in 2024 under South Africa’s Promotion of Access to Information Act (PAIA), was initially simply ignored by the city, says the law firm. So too was a second request for the architectural reports that had been commissioned by the Joburg Development Agency (JDA) for a conditions assessment, with regards to the building’s critical deterioration.
Ignoring a PAIA request is considered a “deemed refusal” under the law – but Webber Wentzel appealed, arguing that the rejection “undermines the principles of transparent and accountable governance which the JDA and the [city] are required to uphold”.
As a “public cultural institution” whose assets “are administered for the enjoyment of the citizens of Johannesburg”, the law firm argued that that citizenry has every right to the information to understand “the governance and structural issues that the JAG faces”.
These issues – such as theft, decay of the gallery building and security problems – have been highlighted by Currency, Daily Maverick and News24 for the past eight months.
Ultimately, the JDA relented and handed over an architectural report compiled by SAJ Architects in mid-December. In it, the architects found that a decision to remove the gallery’s original copper roofs and install a new concrete slab over the basement was illegal in terms of both the city’s own rules and those of the Provincial Heritage Resources Agency of Gauteng (PHRA-G).
“We cannot find PHRA-G approval, nor City of Johannesburg building plan approvals for this renovation,” they wrote.
That renovation had a dire impact on the building in that it did nothing to stop the leaks that have plagued the gallery and made storage of its precious artworks so unsafe since.
No-show
In the case of the catalogue – which the Friends of JAG and the Joburg Heritage Foundation (JHF) have argued is crucial to understanding what has happened to the roughly 9,000 artworks under the city’s care – Webbers has been stonewalled.
For starters, the city argues that the JAG inventory is an internal document “never intended for public access” and that by providing the JAG inventory, there is a “risk of an unfair advantage if and when a procurement of conservation services for the JAG is published”.
That is a baffling response to the civic bodies intent on preserving a collection – thought to be worth hundreds of millions of rands – that was established under a deed of trust more than a century ago, for the benefit not of the city itself but of the residents of Joburg.
But it’s the last reason that raises the most serious questions: that the JAG inventory “contains sensitive information that could compromise the security of the artwork collection”.
This is precisely why the JHF and Friends of JAG have been fighting so hard to access the catalogue to ensure that the artwork is all there. The implied arrogance again belies the fact that the collection belongs to the city’s residents, not the city officials who seem intent on treating this as their own. Insiders suspect that one reason for this is that some of the more valuable artworks have been stolen.
Whether this would be by city officials, aware that nobody could hold anyone accountable without a proper catalogue, or outsiders exploiting the city’s abysmal management of the collection, is unclear.
As Currency wrote last year, the officials in the department of arts, culture and heritage, led by director Vuyisile Mshudulu, are not just indicative of a disregard for the city’s residents; they appear to also be violating the government’s own accounting rules, which prescribe how to classify and record heritage assets.
That arrogance has also emerged in the relationship between the city and the Joburg presidential working group (JPWG) set up by President Cyril Ramaphosa in March.
While the JPWG 7.2 stream (focused on the city’s cultural institutions and heritage sites) has begun its work, city employees appear to have set up a parallel working stream with the JDA, say insiders, who are concerned that this has been done to avoid scrutiny.
“Two hours after the first meeting of the JPWG 7.2, the JDA and city sent out an invite for a parallel process that excluded most of civil society, the funders, Jozi My Jozi, and the national government,” says a highly placed Currency source.
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