Mainstreaming Culture in Development

Nov 06, 2011 AFC Column, Features / Columnists

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By Ruel Johnson

I made the point in a letter a few weeks ago that “Every single aspect of the Jagdeo administration’s engagement with arts and culture – from the Guyana Prize to the President’s Film Endowment – has been based not on a coherent cultural development policy, but on ad hoc spectacle and show with little substance or sustainability.”
After having gone into mountainous labour, the Ramotar Campaign has produced a decidedly underwhelming manifesto in general – filled with white space and filler pages – but one which has surprised even me with the stark paucity of its “cultural policy”.
For all the grandstanding by the administration, from the President to the Minister of Culture to beaming supporters like Al Creighton, the complete treatment that the PPP reserves for culture and the arts in its Manifesto consists entirely of this:
“Upgrade the cultural assets in urban areas and provide similar facilities in rural and hinterland communities.” Nothing else.
This is the sort of blatant anti-intellectualism and unapologetic philistinism of the People’s Progressive Party, which underwrites their treatment of culture and the arts in government policy, or lack thereof.   It is telling that a government that prides itself on its supposed economic acumen and its ‘visionary’ leadership, could not make a link between economic development and cultural policy.
And in a world where roughly 15 years ago, multimillionaire J.K. Rowling was a struggling single mother before a relatively paltry Scottish Arts Council grant turned her words into a multibillion dollar global industry, Donald Ramotar has neglected to include anything of any substance about cultural developmental in a PPP Manifesto that he wants to pass off to us as transformative and visionary.
Or let me put in a way that Mr. Ramotar may be able to comprehend – GuySuCo recorded an operating profit of GYD $85 million (US$425,000) in 2009.  Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows 2, released in July, has so far grossed over US $1.3 billion dollars in theatres.  When you add the US$970 million that the Deathly Hallows 1 grossed, we’re looking at – with a total production cost for both movies at less than US $250M – a box office profit of US $2 billion.   If one were to account for 400 million books sold, the further US$6 billion made by the other films in theatres, DVD and Blue Ray sales, the hundreds of millions made in merchandising, one artistic franchise alone has earned far more in its 15 years of operation than Guyana’s sugar industry has made in a similar timeline.
Yet Donald Ramotar and the PPP he is ‘leading’ into the 2011 polls reserves one single solitary sentence for cultural development in his supposed blueprint for the next five years.  Upgrade what “cultural assets in urban areas”?   The New Amsterdam Opera House?  The Linden Philharmonic?  The Rose Hall Centre for Creative Writing, perhaps?
For the benefit of the Ramotar Campaign, I offer a summary of what a cultural policy should be premised on.  The Alliance For Change’s Cultural Policy – not all of which could have made it into our published Action Plan but still warranted much more than a single sentence – is premised on three basic principles: investment in the artist; investment in the intellectual; investment in the cultural entrepreneur.
Why is this necessary?  How does cultural development dovetail with economic development?  For emerging economies such as ours, we simply do not possess the economies of scale to compete sustainably in a global free market system when it comes to the production of certain primary products, like sugar for example.  What we do however have a monopoly on is a unique cultural heritage, which we can consolidate, develop and transform – where possible – into the creative industries that are a crucial part of the contemporary global economic pie.
Under the AFC’s cultural policy for example, a local publication industry would be stimulated by first investing in the development of writers by the offering of grants to be awarded by an autonomous Arts Fund, comprised of competent people, and the hosting of the very type of ongoing workshop mechanism I have been calling on the Guyana Prize and the Ministry of Culture to host for almost a decade now.
The next pillar would be to involve local intellectuals – creating jobs for UG English and Lit graduates for example – in remunerated work selecting, editing and reviewing the literature produced by our emerging writers.  Under the third pillar of our policy, the very sort of concessions that have been thrown at Queens Atlantic Investments with no clear benefit to the people of Guyana would be spread among smaller entrepreneurial printers, aiding them in developing their capacity to produce competitive quality printed material.
In addition to that, what we intend to provide is an overarching facilitating environment for external investment in and marketing of our creative industries.  GO-Invest and Guyana Marketing Corporation can easily accommodate, respectively, frameworks for equity investment in creative industries and strategic plans for marketing cultural products.
The film, Tropic Thunder, shot on location on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, contributed an estimated US $60 million to that island’s economy.  New Zealand has made billions of dollars as the setting for various cinematic projects from the epic Lord of the Rings trilogy to the highly popular Spartacus series on the Showtime network.
Imagine what a well-constructed policy that uses local creative talent to explore Guyana’s rich cultural and geographic heritage and then marketing those products (scripts) to international investors (film production companies) who would in turn invest in adding value (film production) to that product, such process contributing to the local economy as well as human resource pool, since an AFC policy would stipulate local training internships/pairing for key production positions.
It is therefore mindboggling, this level of incompetence and lack of vision that exists in the People’s Progressive Party.  You have an entire Ministry spending – conservatively speaking – hundreds of millions of dollars annually to come up with a single sentence on cultural development.  What exactly is Frank Anthony, or James Rose, being paid for?  Where is this great commitment to the cultural life of the country that Al Creighton lauded shamelessly less than two months ago?
It is time that Guyana recognizes that while some things have been achieved under the PPP, that is what we elect governments to do, not to do nothing.  What we hold governments accountable for is their failure and their lack of vision, and if the PPP can slip up in such a critical area as cultural and artistic development after 19 years in power, we need to see that there are other areas in which they simply lack the transformative imagination as well as the executive competence to take Guyana forward.  These qualities have been increasingly alienated from that body politic, but which are fortunately now primarily resident in the Alliance For Change.

(The writer is Cultural Policy Advisor to the AFC).

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