Minister Gayton McKenzie - Budget Vote Speech
BY : CHANON LECODEY MERRICKS ONLINE EDITOR KASiBC_AFRiCA
Description
Honourable Members, every government department exists to solve a problem. Some build roads. Some keep us safe. Some teach our children. This department exists to answer a different kind of problem: who are we, and what are we becoming? You cannot build a country only with just concrete and steel. You must also build it with stories, with songs and games, contests and tournaments – with the things people remember in their rocking chair. That is what we do here.
The Department of Sport, Arts and Culture has been allocated R6.617 billion for the 2026/27 financial year: to develop, transform, preserve, protect and promote sport, arts and culture, and through them, to build a nation that is active, creative, winning, and cohesive.
Summary
MINISTER GAYTON MCKENZIE
NATIONAL ASSEMBLY – 12 MAY 2026
House Chairperson
Deputy Minister of Sport, Arts and Culture, Hon Peace Mabe
Ministers and Deputy Ministers present
Chairperson of the Portfolio Committee, Hon Joe McGluwa
Honourable Members
Chairpersons and Chief Executives of our Public Entities
Director-General Khumalo and the DSAC executive team
Distinguished Guests, Members of the Media
Ladies and Gentlemen
Honourable Members, every government department exists to solve a problem. Some build roads. Some keep us safe. Some teach our children. This department exists to answer a different kind of problem: who are we, and what are we becoming? You cannot build a country only with just concrete and steel. You must also build it with stories, with songs and games, contests and tournaments – with the things people remember in their rocking chair. That is what we do here.
The Department of Sport, Arts and Culture has been allocated R6.617 billion for the 2026/27 financial year: to develop, transform, preserve, protect and promote sport, arts and culture, and through them, to build a nation that is active, creative, winning, and cohesive.
Sport and Recreation
Under Programme 2, Recreation Development and Sport Promotion, we are allocating R1.341 billion.
South Africa successfully hosted LIV Golf at Steyn City in March 2026, attracting elite international players and extensive global media coverage, and proving once more that our country can execute world-class events to world-class standards. The pipeline of future events this opens is as valuable as the tournament itself.
FIFA World Cup
The 2026 FIFA World Cup – hosted across the United States, Canada, and Mexico – is an opportunity we are treating as a strategic national moment, not just a spectator sport. We are deepening partnerships with host nations on tourism packages, commercial opportunities, and knowledge exchange. Our support to Bafana Bafana and other national teams has been intensified, because South Africa will be present on that stage, and will present competitively.
Beyond football, we are using this World Cup to showcase South Africa’s arts, culture and heritage through exhibitions, performances and cultural diplomacy across Mexico, the United States and Canada. We have also launched a national supporter mobilisation campaign with our corporate partners, including the Lucky Fans Competition, to give ordinary South Africans an opportunity to stand behind Bafana Bafana on the global stage.
We will honour the legacy of the 2010 FIFA World Cup – the only FIFA World Cup ever hosted on African soil – with South Africa’s 2010 legends expected to face Mexico’s 2010 legends in a commemorative Legends Match in Pachuca on 7 June 2026. The spirit of 2010 lives on.
Looking further ahead, South Africa is not approaching the 2027 ICC Cricket World Cup – which we co-host with Zimbabwe and Namibia – as a routine assignment. It is a national project. Infrastructure upgrades are underway at the Wanderers, Newlands, and Kingsmead. Interdepartmental coordination is activated. We are using the tournament to accelerate transformation in the sport and leave a genuine development legacy in townships and rural communities.
Olympics
On the Olympic front: work continues on Project 350, our plan to send the largest and most competitive Team South Africa ever to Los Angeles in 2028. The Department and SASCOC are working with provinces and federations being drawn into their respective roles. Together we are also continuing the work on our bid for South Africa to host a Summer Olympic Games in 2036.
Federations and VAR
Federation support this year is R118.1 million, directed to about 60 national sport federations with strengthened compliance and governance requirements.
Nearly two years ago when I took office, I promised South Africans that VAR would be rolled out, and this Department would ensure that happens. I am proud to announce that on Sunday at the South African Football Association’s NEC meeting in Johannesburg, I agreed with SAFA that they would sign off on the finalisation of procurement of this equipment immediately, with the money having been transferred to them earlier this year, and the implementation roadmap clearly laid out.
Having VAR in our league, cup tournaments and internationals will not only raise the fairness of our game, it will also raise its quality – our players will learn that they need to earn their wins the hard way; the honest way. And the country’s most loved sport will be left far better off.
Ministerial Infrastructure Projects
Beyond the conditional grant, this Department has earmarked R102 million for the delivery of ministerial infrastructure projects this year – four new swimming pools, long-needed upgrades to Eldorado Park Stadium and Mmabatho Stadium, expanded combi courts and outdoor gyms, and the Boxing Arena at the Orient.
Before we took office, this department was building no more than 10 outdoor gyms and 10 combi courts every year for a decade. We have now done more than three times as many gyms, and soon that will be ramped up considerably further, and we have already doubled the physical delivery of combi courts, with a fivefold increase targeted for this year.
These are not abstract budget lines. These are facilities where the next generation of South African athletes will be discovered.
Arts, Culture and Creative Industries
Under Programme 3, Arts and Culture Promotion and Development, we are allocating R1.809 billion.
On 30 March 2026, at Nirox Sculpture Park in Krugersdorp, we officially launched the 17 CCI Sector Cluster organisations. This is thirty years of frustration being answered with structure. The clusters have boards. They have signed declarations of accountability. They will have shared office space, shared services, and people agitating on behalf of creatives for the first time with institutional weight behind them.
Our creatives have waited long enough. The clusters are not the end of that wait – they are the architecture through which the waiting ends.
Presidential Employment Stimulus Programme
The Department has secured nearly R400 million from the Presidential Employment Stimulus Programme Phase 7, implemented through four entities: the National Arts Council, the National Film and Video Foundation, the National Museum, and the National Heritage Council. Provinces that have historically received less are being prioritised. We expect this investment to create 10,000 work opportunities in the creative sector this financial year.
The Cultural and Creative Industries Programme has already supported 125 organisations and practitioners, while the Touring Ventures Programme has enabled 26 organisations and practitioners to carry South African culture to nine countries as cultural ambassadors. Amapiano is not waiting for a policy framework – it has already captivated the world. Our job is to build the infrastructure so the next wave of South African artists does not succeed despite the system, but because of it.
Entity Oversight
Honourable Members, strengthening oversight over our public entities has become one of the central priorities of this Ministry. Over the past months, the Department’s Crack Team has worked intensively across entities to identify governance weaknesses, financial risks, operational blockages and institutional failures that have too often been allowed to continue for years without decisive intervention.
Last Thursday, I convened all Board and Council Chairpersons to present a clear roadmap for the future of governance within this portfolio. The message was straightforward: oversight structures must become active centres of accountability, not ceremonial structures that meet quarterly while institutions decline. Board members must know the difference between governance and interference, between oversight and silence, and between loyalty to individuals and loyalty to the law. The objective is simple: public entities that are stable, ethical, functional and capable of delivering measurable value for our country.
Of special mention is that Robben Island’s infrastructure programme is advancing, with six capital projects underway. The first phase of the Nelson Mandela Prison House is being prepared for opening in July 2026.
Heritage
Under Programme 4, Heritage Promotion and Preservation, we are allocating R2.912 billion, including R1.718 billion transferred to provinces for community library services – supporting 18 new and upgraded library facilities throughout the country this year to promote access to information and to instil the culture of reading and writing, particularly among young people.
Our repatriation programme is not slowing down. On 23 March 2026, President Ramaphosa and I led the reburial of 63 Khoi and San ancestral remains in Steinkopf in the Northern Cape. This was part of restorative justice after these remains were acquired during colonialism to promote racist pseudoscience. In April, we returned the Zimbabwe soapstone bird – a cultural and spiritual emblem of profound importance – alongside eight ancestral human remains, to Zimbabwe. This was an act of partnership and restitution that reflects who we choose to be as a country.
We will be accelerating our efforts to return every unethically acquired historical artefact or human remains in our museums – because we cannot call on the West to return the hundreds of thousands of pieces in their collections that, by rights, they should not possess, if we do not lead by example on our own continent.
When it comes to bringing the remains of our own fallen heroes home, technical teams have visited Lesotho, and our 2026/27 focus extends to Angola, Lesotho, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. There are still thousands of our heroes buried on foreign soil. We will not rest until they have reached their final rest.
Mandela Collection and Robben Island
The Nelson Mandela collection – gifts ranging from children’s drawings to diplomatic objects from heads of state – was declared a specially protected heritage collection by SAHRA on 30 March 2026. We celebrate this formally on International Museums Day, 18 May, at the Bhunga Building in Mthatha.
Legislative Review and Naming
We are reviewing the National Heritage Resources Act, which is now 27 years old and overdue for a reckoning with the present. The National Policy Framework for Heritage Memorialisation will be finalised this year. A Heritage Masterplan is being developed. The Bureau of Heraldry is finalising the new Heraldry Bill to replace legislation from 1962. Twenty-two geographical names were gazetted this financial year, including four significant Eastern Cape town names, among them KuGompo City and Robert Sobukwe.
Allow me to pause and reflect here that when the name of Beyers Naude Drive was changed from DF Malan Drive, there was no outcry. When something is renamed to honour Nelson Mandela, no one complains. But when you recognise Robert Sobukwe, who made a profound sacrifice and was kept in the most inhuman form of isolation on Robben Island, one’s phone never stops ringing. You are called every name imaginable as a Minister.
But let me either remind or inform the producers of this cacophony of protest: Robert Sobukwe was a man for whom the apartheid state wrote an entire piece of legislation – the Sobukwe Clause – so that they could hold him on Robben Island, alone, year after year, without charge or trial. He died under house arrest, never tasting the freedom we now treat cheaply. If we cannot place his name on the map of this country that he gave his life for, then the transformation of our heritage landscape means nothing.
This renaming was not generosity. It is the bare minimum a free South Africa owes him.
The transformation of our heritage landscape cannot be postponed. We will push it forward with clear conscience and consistent purpose.
In Closing
Honourable Members, I have been asked many times what the measure of success for this portfolio is.
It is not the events we host or the facilities we open, though those matter. It is not the awards our athletes and artists win, though they inspire us all.
The measure is whether the child in Khayelitsha gets to play hockey. Whether the child in Lusikisiki gets to walk into a library and find a book written in her language, about her people. Whether the musician from Mamelodi can make a living from her talent without being exploited, because there is finally an institution standing in her corner.
We are not there yet. But we are closer than we were. And with this budget, we are taking another deliberate step.
I would like to close with the final stanza of a famous old poem, “Don’t Quit”, often attributed to Edgar Albert Guest. Whoever wrote it, it belongs to us all – a reminder of why we work, and why we do not stop in our Government of National Unity, which is changing this country for the better every day.
Success is failure turned inside out –
The silver tint of the clouds of doubt,
And you never can tell how close you are,
It may be near when it seems afar;
So stick to the fight when you’re hardest hit –
It’s when things seem worst that you must not quit.
We propose that this House adopts Budget Vote 37.
I thank you, Chairperson.
Title
Minister Gayton McKenzie - Budget Vote Speech
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