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“Our job is to build a nation,” says fund recipient Carol Bouwer.
First published by Ground.
Over the past two years, the National Lottery Commission has awarded nearly R7 million in grants to fund lavish prize ceremonies.
Money for him Mbokodo Awards, staged by Carol Bouwer Productions, was channeled through the nonprofit Venalor. Carol Bouwer Productions is a for-profit company that shares directors and premises with Venalor.
The awards celebrate “the contribution of women to rebuilding the social fabric through the arts.”
Last week Ground reported that Venalor had received almost R4.7 million in lottery funds in financial year 2018/2019, and R2 million and R292,300 respectively in August and November 2019. The company also received a grant of R100,000 from the National Commission of Lotteries Covid-19 relief fund, intended to help nonprofits “struggling to stay afloat during this time.” Bouwer had refused to say what Venalor did or what the money had been used for.
However, after the story was published, he wrote a lyrics explaining why she had chosen to use Venalor to apply for Lottery funds “to avoid being excluded from grants because we are a company.”
In addition to the awards, the funds had been used “to run workshops, an exhibition, women’s summits and the award ceremonies for which we had applied,” said Bouwer. “We have provided evidence of this and the more than 1000 beneficiaries of this work can attest to it. The work impacted more than 900 women in cooperatives, more than a thousand women in small businesses and aspiring entrepreneurs ”.
However, Venalor’s accounts – that Bouwer supplied – for the years ending February 2019 and 2020 show no trace of any of this. The R4,672,180 granted in 2019 and the R2,292,300 in 2020 included expenses such as:
- “Event venue” (R487,387 in 2019 and R104,573 in 2020);
- Travel and accommodation (R465,287 in 2019 and R538,854 in 2020);
- “Cast, talent, hiring of spaces and support” (R367,871 in 2019 and R527,000 in 2020);
- Stage and audio (a whopping R2,245,811 in 2019 and R1,015,000 in 2020);
- “Production” (R516,287 in 2019 and R5,950 in 2020); and
- Mbokodo awards the prize money of the winners (R487,626 in 2019 and only R60,000 in 2020).
This left only R100,911 of Lottery funding for workshops, summits, exhibitions or to assist women’s cooperatives or small businesses in 2019 and only R23 in 2020 (audited financial statements report only a balance of R1,911 in 2019, but it seems to be a bug.)
Bouwer said he had unsuccessfully applied for Lottery funds for the prizes in the past. But that changed after former NLC board chair Alfred Nevhutanda attended the 2017 awards as a guest guest, he told GroundUp.
“He was embarrassed when he saw the work we were doing with women and the arts and he got on stage and praised us and promised the Lottery’s support for future prizes,” said Bouwer.
Nevhutanda kept his word and the NLC funded the Mbokodo Awards through Venalor in 2019 and again in 2020.
Bouwer says the NLC told him the commission did not support private businesses and advised him to create a nonprofit to apply for a grant.
Venalor, which Bouwer says is the “CSI [corporate social investment] arm of the business ”, does not appear to have any dedicated staff of its own, and has apparently only been used to solicit funds from the Lottery.
However, he received 100,000 rand, divided into 60,000 rand for “salaries” and 40,000 rand for “stipends” from the NLC Covid-19 special aid fund.
In fiscal year 2018, Mbokodo awards earned R6,194,545 from the KwaZulu-Natal Department of Economic Development, Tourism and Environmental Affairs. the audited statements for that year they are in the name of “The Mbokodo Awards 2018 project”, not Venalor.
“Our job is nation building and it fills us with pride. The important community work that Mbokodo is doing should not be excluded from access to the funds that we contribute as companies and as individuals, ”said Bouwer.
When asked by Ground to comment, Nevhutanda said: “I attended the Mbokodo awards as I have been attending invitations from various NPOs and NGOs representing the NLC.” He said his speech had focused on the procedure that any organization must follow to apply for funding. “In conclusion, I said that NLC will support organizations with good initiatives like the ones I am seeing with the Mbokodo Awards because they empower women. I said everyone should submit applications that meet the funding requests. My statement had no conditions. ” DM
