Heavyweight political
Public funds are given to enable democracy to function effectively. But the distribution has been wilfully skewed and there is no accountability
It took more than a month for the treasury and the Independent Electoral Commission to add up just how much public money is flowing into the private banks of political parties from various sources. And when they found out, this was pretty much all the information that they could provide.
The answer is R1.09-billion. A year. And it’s rising at a rate of about 10% a year.
The ANC is probably receiving more than R600-million a year, not from private donors, the Guptas or state-owned enterprises but from the public. And it’s all legal. For now.
As the Constitutional Court has pointed out, political parties are an integral part of modern South Africa’s democracy and so the public investment makes constitutional sense, not least because section 236 of the Constitution requires public funding of political parties.
They incur significant expenditure going about a task without which we would have no democracy at all and smaller parties especially cannot rely on wealthy private donors to fill their pockets.
But it is also a highly controversial subject: Is it a wise and justifiable investment in public resources, particularly at a time when the national fiscus is under great pressure?
Moreover, there is uncertainty about where as much as R949million of the total public spend on political parties is ending up and how it is being spent. This is according to evidence that emerged during the recent parliamentary ad hoc committee hearings on party political funding. A draft Bill, covering private and public funding, was published by the committee on September 15.
Political parties receive public money in three forms. The first is from the Represented Political Party Fund (RPPF), created by the Public Funding of Represented Political Parties Act of 1997. The second two are allocations by the National Assembly and the provincial legislatures to fulfil the constitutional requirement to “enable the party and its leader to perform their functions … effectively.”
There are huge problems with all three.
Although the RPPF accounts for the smallest percentage of the funds, it is arguably the most significant, for two reasons. The first is that, unlike the other two sources, these funds are made available to parties for a broader range of activities, including campaigning, a vital party activity, which falls out of the scope of the funding that parties receive from the national and provincial legislatures.
The second reason is that, unlike the funding allocated by the national and provincial legislatures, we know exactly where it is going and how it