South Africa has a National Arts Council again. The Gauteng Division of the High Court in Pretoria on Thursday set aside Arts, Sport and Culture Minister Gayton McKenzie’s decision to dissolve the NAC's governing council, ordering the eleven members reinstated pending a full review of his decision.

Judge A Millar’s ruling suspends McKenzie’s 25 May dissolution and interdicts him from taking any further steps to implement it, including starting the process of appointing a replacement council, until the underlying review is finally decided.

“There is no Council,” Millar noted in the judgment. “There needs to be a Council for the statutory scheme to operate.”

McKenzie's move followed two letters to the NAC earlier this year. The first, dated 22 April, asked the council to convene urgently to settle a long-running labour dispute over performance bonuses dating back to the 2019/20 financial year. The council scheduled a special meeting for 29 May to consider the matter.

Before that meeting could happen, McKenzie dissolved the council on 25 May, citing the delay, unspecified “credible information” about procurement decisions, and what he called a “broader breakdown in institutional leadership and governance.”

Millar found that reasoning didn't hold up, at least not for the purposes of the interim order. The council hadn't yet had the opportunity to deal with the bonus matter the Minister himself had flagged as urgent, the judge said, so that couldn't reasonably have justified dissolving it days before the scheduled meeting. He made no finding on whether the Minister’s broader grounds were ultimately valid; that question sits with the pending review.

Without a council, the NAC has been operating under its CEO alone. The judgment stresses he has no independent authority to make policy decisions and remains subject to the council under the governing Act.

McKenzie argued in his answering papers that the process to appoint a new council “has not yet commenced” and would take upward of six months, and that there was accordingly no urgency to the applicants’ case. Millar turned that argument back on him: a six-month vacancy at the head of a statutory body was itself evidence of the harm the applicants stood to suffer, and of why the balance of convenience favoured reinstating them rather than leaving the NAC without governance while the review plays out.

The Minister’s late filing of his opposing papers, for which he cited overseas commitments including the FIFA World Cup and the Commonwealth Games, was condoned by the court.

In a statement issued the same day, the NAC's board welcomed the judgment as “an affirmation of lawful governance, institutional accountability and the proper stewardship of public resources,” and said the proceedings had never been about individuals or positions but about protecting the statutory framework Parliament had set up for the council.

The board said its immediate priority was to resume oversight of the institution and said it remained willing 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.

The review of McKenzie's original decision to dissolve the council, the matter that will determine whether it was lawful in the first place, is still to be heard