MICHAEL BEAUMONT | Accountability needed for party funding transparency

The Western Cape High Court was recently the scene in which the future of party funding transparency held centre stage. The application brought by My Vote Counts seeks to remove the donation disclosure threshold of R100,000 (making every donation disclosable), and reducing the annual limit on donations by a donor to a political party.

At the crux of the application is the view of My Vote Counts that private funding is the gateway to corruption — an odd position for an organisation that is donor-funded but claims on its website “Our donors have no material influence on our work ...”

In a fashion no less out of touch than Marie Antoinette’s infamous “let them eat cake,” My Vote Counts seems to believe that South African taxpayers should contribute more than the current R1.5bn per annum to fund political parties — compensating for the private donor funding losses it acknowledges will follow if the application is granted.

ActionSA opposed this application fervently. Our opposition was not an opposition to transparency. ActionSA has consistently led the charge for transparency in party funding, filed its disclosures, achieved consecutive clean audits and laid charges against contraventions of the act by other parties.

Our opposition was based on the short-sightedness of the application itself which seems to think transparency alone is the hallmark of a healthy democracy.

The reality for those of us who have licked the envelopes for party funding is that prospective donors who are willing and able to make donations above the threshold are few and far between. If you analyse donations disclosed by the IEC, the truth is that only a small handful of donors are contributing lawfully to political parties across the spectrum in South Africa.

The truth is most donors are fearful of making donations that are publicised and invite political, economic or regulatory reprisal upon them, their families or their businesses. If My Vote Counts gets its way, and donations of every size must be disclosed — private party funding will all but disappear.

So why should you care?

Making party funding more elusive will entrench the political status quo in a country which is rejecting the status quo for its complicity in the challenges so many South Africans face.

It does this by throttling emerging parties that do not receive much or any public funding and prevents them from getting a foot in the door in the manner that ActionSA did in the 2024 national and provincial elections. This could not be more dangerous at a time in which the former opposition ranks have been decimated as they stampeded for blue light vehicles and ministerial perks and privileges.

My Vote Count’s rather myopic view on transparency being the panacea of a democracy comes at the price of the dictum of our constitution requiring our democracy to be multiparty in its nature.

Our constitutionally enshrined freedom of speech is not limited to speaking freely but receiving speech freely. In a political context this relates to the ability of South Africans to have real political choices as a direct result of being able to receive the offers, manifestos and track records of political parties (plural) in a multiparty democracy. Already, the existing party funding regulations have reduced private funding significantly. What My Vote Counts seeks to achieve will quite literally mean that South Africans will see and hear fewer offers from less political parties going forward in a country which is rejecting the political establishment.

The notion that every donation, no matter how small, must be declared rests on the absurd idea that Mrs Khumalo from Soweto, who donates R10 to ActionSA, and Mr Van Wyk from Bloemfontein, who donates R20, are somehow conspiring to buy influence in a party that spent millions on an election campaign, while still being vastly outspent by established parties.

This point was telling when judge Hayley Slingers posed the question about whether exposing Mrs Khumalo’s R10 donation was not, in all likelihood exposing her likely vote, in contravention of the constitutionally protected notion of her vote being a secret. After all, why would Mrs Khumalo give R10 to a party and vote for another?

This is where My Vote Counts has selectively ignored the important qualification that the Constitutional Court imposed on the right to party funding information as needing to be “reasonable access.” It is not reasonable to invade Mrs Khumalo’s right to privacy in the belief that her R10 can buy influence in ActionSA. It is not reasonable to believe that the average voter will determine their vote on a data dump of the information pertaining to thousands of individually inconsequential donations. It is not reasonable to expect the IEC and political parties to employ entire floors of accountants to gather and report datapoints on thousands of individual micro donations.

My Vote Counts has also picked the wrong hill to die on in the name of transparency in party funding. The real fight is the impunity of noncompliance with existing legislation. ActionSA has lodged a complaint about the ANC’s settlement of a R102m debt with Ezulweni Investments at a time when they could not pay striking workers and had disclosed only R10m in donations.

ActionSA lodged a further complaint about the EFF’s FNB Stadium rally in 2023, estimated to cost more than R70m, without donations disclosed in the quarter before or after. Another complaint was lodged by ActionSA about the MK Party disclosing only R300,000 in donations when it was clearly one of the most funded parties in this last election. The IEC has refused to investigate each of these cases.

How, in this environment, will reducing disclosure thresholds or annual maximums matter when so many parties are patently ignoring the provisions of the legislation as it stands? Why is the focus on vilifying the few donors that give and disclose transparently because they are not would-be-corruptors? If we are honest with ourselves, we must accept that a person intent on committing corruption, a crime with a sentence of 15 years in prison, is probably not going to shake with fear at the prospects of a fine from the Party Funding Act.

The real fight for party funding transparency is in the implementation of the existing regulations and not in throttling the funding to new emerging and law-abiding political parties who must compete with established and corrupt parties on an uneven playing field created by NGOs who are paving the road to hell with their blissfully ignorant good intentions.

• Michael Beaumont is national chairperson of ActionSA.

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