Parliament recognises it must get to grips with funding
Sincethe ANC’s unbanning in 1990, its elective congresses have featured swanky business lounges for captains of industry to gain access to the party’s leadership.
In 2015, businessmen paid from R100,000 to R1.5m a seat to attend an ANC gala dinner at which they would have access to President Jacob Zuma.
Nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) have long bemoaned SA’s model of political funding as too vague and opaque and have called for greater transparency — to no avail. They argue that there should be regulation of funding in line with AU, UN and other anticorruption codes to which the government is a signatory.
In September 2015, My Vote Counts lost its Constitutional Court case in which it tried to compel Parliament to be more robust in making political parties disclose the sources of their private donations.
All the political parties in the National Assembly were cited as respondents and none opposed the application; it was only opposed by Parliament.
Much has happened since. The ANC’s electoral dominance suffered a setback in the 2016 local government elections and the party is at the crossroads as it prepares for an elective congress later in 2017 amid growing calls for Zuma to step down and mounting allegations of state capture.
It is against this backdrop and shifting political landscape that Parliament, which had opposed My Vote Counts, established an ad hoc committee to study the case for establishing a legal framework to regulate private donations made to political parties.
Opposition parties have questioned the motive and timing of this development. They have also questioned the intentions of the ANC, without which the process would not have been launched by Parliament.
Under the existing law, political parties are obliged to report only on the audited figures of their allocations from the Electoral Commission of SA (IEC).
NGOs say this leaves politics vulnerable to symbiotic relationships developing between political parties and their business benefactors. Politicians reward patronage with lucrative government contracts.
Ad hoc committee chairman Vincent Smith, the ANC MP who managed Parliament’s inquiry into the SABC’s affairs, says the work on political party funding is important to ensure that voters’ voices continue to find expression and are not dulled by political parties beholden to narrow interests.
“It’s really to regulate political party funding to make it more transparent and make political parties accountable for who they get their funds from and that money doesn’t swallow the wishes of the public who elect parties into power,” says Smith.
Political parties should be able to account for all the funding they receive outside of the allocations from the national fiscus, he says.
“Political parties must declare. Civil society has been clamouring for this for a long time,” he concedes.
The ANC made a submission to the ad hoc committee, proposing the establishment of a central fund for all political parties.
DA chief whip John Steenhuisen welcomes this, but cautions that the ANC’s sudden call for transparency could be a smokescreen to cushion the struggling governing party from future funding shortfalls.
“The ANC lost 20 MPs and other legislature members, and this is a way to plug the public funding gap that emerged as a result. They know their public funds will dry up if they are no longer in government,” Steenhuisen says.
Right2Know spokesman Murray Hunter says there is a good case to be made to regulate private donations to political parties.
“The public deserves to know where political parties get their funding and what they do with it. This has been an unresolved issue for democracy for over 20 years and a lot of damage has been done as a result of this,” says Hunter.
Right2Know estimates that, for every R1 major political parties receive from the public purse, they get an additional R6 from private sources.
Political analyst Judith February, who has also made a submission to the ad hoc committee, says the IEC should manage party funding through new legislation that requires all party donations, both public and private, to be channelled into a national democracy fund.
“There is increasing evidence that many corporate donors … would prefer to make donations openly. In turn, there is indication that greater openness will, in fact, result in a higher level of corporate donations from those that seek to see their contributions put to good use,” she says.
“Those deterred from making donations openly may well have some nefarious motive for secrecy.”
The committee is expected to evaluate all written submissions in August and to hear oral submissions on August 14 and 15.
It expects to conclude its work in December, just in time for the ANC’s elective congress.