“He who pays the piper picks the tune,” says Matsobane Nkoko, the manager of political party funding at the Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC).
Identifying who is paying the piper in South Africa has been a long, arduous journey, littered with potholes. Money in South African politics remains a murky and contested terrain, despite legislation introduced in 2021 to increase transparency.
The Promotion of Access to Information Amendment Act and the Political Party Funding Act (PPFA), rooted in advocacy by nonprofit organisation My Vote Counts, have helped to shed light on who funds political parties — but the legislation is still flawed and My Vote Counts, in conjunction with the IEC, is exploring ways to tighten it.
My Vote Counts will head back to court in February in a bid to ensure that all political party donations are declared. The case is likely to be finalised ahead of the 2026 local government election, which has taken on increased importance in light of the shock results in the general election in May.
The past year has been eventful on the party funding front.
Possibly the most significant development was the Electoral Matters Amendment Act (EMAA) that President Cyril Ramaphosa signed into law three weeks before the May election.
The PPFA originally set an annual cap of R15m on the amount of donations a single party could receive, and set R100,000 as the level at which disclosure of an individual donor was triggered. But the amendment effectively scrapped these thresholds by giving the president the power to set them in conjunction with National Assembly resolutions.
No new levels were set before the election.
In August My Vote Counts won a court ruling that overturned the EMAA as unconstitutional. The judge said it had created a “lacuna” in the law.
While the presidency initially opposed the application by My Vote Counts, it later withdrew and the thresholds were reinstated.
There are challenges that come with the requirement for self-disclosure … We find ourselves questioning a lot of things
— Matsobane Nkoko
But the end result of the passing of the EMAA, short-lived as the legislation was, was that during the high-stakes political activity between May and August parties did not have to declare their funding.
Still, Nkoko tells the FM that in the first quarter of 2024, when the disclosure requirements were still in force, the IEC recorded some of the highest political donations since the law was implemented three years ago.
For the first time since 2021, total declarations passed the R100m mark in a single quarter. Donations were declared by 13 parties, two of which failed to win seats in parliament or a provincial legislature in May.
Notably absent from the 13 parties was Jacob Zuma’s MK Party, which marks its first anniversary this month. DA leader John Steenhuisen told the Financial Times in June that he believed MK was bankrolled by Russia, though he could not provide evidence.
The system requires that parties themselves report their funding, a clause in the act that MPs strongly supported. But Nkoko says this provision is open to abuse and the IEC is conducting research in other jurisdictions to explore alternatives, which it will share with parliament for consideration.
“There are challenges that come with the requirement for self-disclosure … We find ourselves questioning a lot of things, even in annual reports,” he says.
Regardless of the funding disclosure issue, all parties — about 500 are registered with the IEC — are required to provide audited financial statements to the commission. Only four parties made declarations for the latest quarter.
The law does provide for anyone with “prima facie evidence” of contraventions of the political funding legislation to report such violations to the IEC. The IEC even set up a panel of forensic investigators in anticipation of such reports, but so far, Nkoko says, no-one has submitted a complaint worth following up.
He notes that there has been little enthusiasm from donors to contribute to the multiparty democracy fund, a pool of money that is distributed among all the parties. But the distributions are based largely on proportionality, meaning the larger parties benefit more than the smaller ones.
The IEC has approached the South African Revenue Service to consider an incentive for donors who contribute to this fund, but Nkoko says the commission has nothing to show for it yet.
The battle for true transparency is far from over.
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