Parliament’s home affairs committee had opted for secrecy over accountability by doubling the disclosure threshold limits for political party funding, an NGO that promotes accountability in the electoral system has said.
The committee decided last week to double the disclosure threshold in the Political Party Funding Act from R100,000 to R200,000 and the cap on annual donations by an individual donor from R15m to R30m. The justification was the high cost of running a political party or independent campaign.
This was an ANC proposal not opposed by other committee members, though the EFF proposed limits of R1m and R100m respectively.
These limits will have to be adopted by the National Assembly and be promulgated by President Cyril Ramaphosa to take effect.
Threshold limits are important as the funding of political parties and independents is a way to gain influence as has allegedly been the case with the ANC, the funding of which has allegedly secured lucrative government contracts. Disclosure provides the means to identify a possible influence by donors on political outcomes while the annual limit strives to limit it.
Committee chair Mosa Chabane (ANC) justified the committee’s decision saying it “strikes a balance between the considerable cost of running political programmes and the need for transparency. The resolution we have made is crucial to bring the threshold in line with inflationary increases over time.”
‘Irrational’ decision
But My Vote Counts (MVC), which precipitated the reconsideration of the limits through its high court application, strongly criticised the “irrational” decision as not being based on evidence. It warned it would take whatever legal action was necessary “to ensure that our party funding legislation is rational and premised on the needs of SA’s context, not the whims of those in power who have a vested interest in shrouding party funding in secrecy”.
The NGO considers the existing limits of R100,000 and R15m as being unjustifiably high in the SA context and is contesting this in the Western Cape High Court. It wants all donations disclosed.
MVC senior researcher Joel Bregman said the committee was “entirely unable to justify and substantiate their reasoning for arriving at these new limits. The committee has failed to address this crucial matter through a rational approach that is based on principle and evidence.”
Committee members, he said, “had rejected well-considered and evidence-based approaches to determining political funding limits that were proposed by the parliamentary budget office, laying bare that power and money trump principle”.
The DA did not oppose the committee’s decision. DA member of the committee Adrian Roos said the DA had proposed inflation-related increases in the interim. “Others felt the increase should be fixed and rounded amounts which were close to the inflation-related amounts. We then did not disagree to that as an interim measure.
“The DA has requested a report on the effect of the [Political Party Funding Act] and whether it is serving its stated purpose. Currently we are being required to make policy decisions without evidence. The DA has also called for stronger action on monitoring the [act] where parties do not make disclosures at all or make disclosures that objectively don’t align with expenditure patterns are adequately investigated,” Roos said.
Bregman also critcised the lack of evidence-based decision-making by the committee which disregarded submissions made by the parliamentary budget office, which noted the original limits were not determined on the basis of any studies, data or analysis regarding their appropriateness.
The office noted that SA “stands out as an outlier for being a middle-income country with a higher private donation upper limit than many higher income nations such as Poland and Mexico, where stricter regulations impose private donation limits based on minimum wage multiples or campaign expenditure limits”.
The office recommended that further research was required to determine appropriate limits, noting that the committee had several evidence-based options to choose from. Adjustments to the limits and threshold should align with SA’s economic conditions, international best practices and democratic principles.
“Our courts have recognised that failing to take relevant information into account when adopting a particular legislative scheme can render the legislation irrational,” Bregman noted.
Last year parliament adopted amendments to the act that left it to presidential discretion to decide the limit and threshold through regulations. Until he did so there would be none and political parties were under no obligation to disclose any donor funding. MVC successfully contested this lacuna in court, which reinstated the original limits pending their reconsideration by parliament.
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