The act has come under fire as it favours parties and not independent candidates who are expected to be eligible to contest elections in 2024.
Independent candidates, expected to be eligible to contest national and provincial elections by 2024, have called for the amending of the legislation that regulates donor funding to political parties to include candidates unaffiliated with political parties.
This is amid calls by the ANC, which has previously admitted to a cash flow crisis which led to it being unable to pay salaries, to amend the Political Party Funding Act (PPFA) to increase the declaration threshold for donor funding beyond R100,000.
SA’s second largest political party, the DA, did not support the passing of the legislation by parliament because it does not believe it will achieve its stated objectives which include, among other things, providing transparency regarding the funds received by political parties from donors in an effort to deepen democracy. The DA would therefore support any amendments to the legislation based on its merits, says the party’s federal finance chair, Dion George.
The latest report on disclosures covering the third quarter of 2021 and published by the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) this year, says parties collectively received more than R46m, with the ANC receiving R22.8m, the DA declared it got R12.5m, Herman Mashaba’s Action SA declared donations of R5m and the EFF received R3m.
The PPFA was enacted in April 2021 and governs the private financing of political parties but is silent on financing of independent candidates.
Judging from the results of the 2021 local government elections, there is a growing appetite from voters to cast ballots for independent candidates. During 2021’s municipal elections independents receive 1.75% of the total vote, translating to 51 seats in municipalities nationwide, a slight increase from 2016 where independents won 1.13% of the vote, translating to 27 seats across municipalities.
Reform of the Electoral Act, under consideration by parliament, will see the legislation being compliant with the Constitutional Court judgment, which found that the country’s electoral law was unconstitutional insofar as it does not provide for the election of independent candidates.
The amendments makes provision for 200 members of the National Assembly to be elected on a proportional basis of votes obtained by political parties while the other 200 seats of the house are allocated for representatives from both political parties and independent candidates.
Any amendments to the Electoral Act is expected to have a knock-on effect on the process to amend the PPFA because it is likely that independents will have to disclose their funders like political parties, says Robyn Pasensie, researcher at civil society organisation My Vote Counts.
Mmusi Maimane, chief activist at One SA Movement (OSA), an umbrella body for independent candidates and groupings, says the PPFA favours political parties and makes it difficult for democracy to be fully entrenched.
“As soon as someone is elected, they get what they call constituency funding and in the constituency funding it is designed that the MP can do work in the constituency, but frankly, they end up only doing work for the party. Which is cheating the voters in the constituency,” Maimane told Business Day.
The PPFA should be amended so that donors finance constituencies instead of political parties “because if we don’t reform that system [and] if we just keep pumping money into parties and increasing that threshold, we’ll end up with a different form of a party capture, which eventually leads to state capture,” he says.
The declaration of funding received from public and private sectors is welcome as part of fighting the endemic corruption in government, says Mkhangeli Matomela, national convener of the Citizens Parliament which is a part of the New Nation Movement (NNM). The NNM was successful in its Constitutional Court application to reform SA’s electoral laws to include independents.
“If decreasing the threshold for declaration is good to fight corruption, that is the way to go. If increasing the threshold means leaving large sums of funding outside the anti-corruption network, we say no to that,” Matomela says.
