The Electoral Commission of SA (IEC) intends to bolster its investigative capacity by year-end, to probe allegations of contravening the Political Party Fund Act by political parties.
The act, which places a R15m annual limit on the amount of funds a party can receive from a single donor, was enacted in April 2021 and is aimed at providing transparency regarding funds received by political parties from donors.
Under the legislation, the IEC is required to monitor that political parties adhere to the limit as well as disclosure of the funding. However, the IEC cannot proactively probe political parties who do not comply with the legislation and the electoral body does not have internal capacity to probe any transgressions, requiring it to appoint external investigators.
“We are not in the business of forensics we are in the business of elections, but if there is a complaint that is brought to our attention and someone must follow the money ... we don’t have the capacity,” says IEC party funding CEO George Mahlangu.
The deadline set by the IEC to appoint the panel of investigators follows the September deadline that political parties have to submit their audited financial statements to the IEC.
To adequately deal with the submissions from the registered political parties, the IEC is finalising the appointment of a panel of investigators, comprising auditing professionals and firms, forensic investigators and legal firms, who will be used on case-by-case basis.
Any allegations of contravention of the Act by political parties will only be investigated if there a prima facie substance to the complaint, Mahlangu says.
“If you allege that a political party has received donations and hasn’t declared [you] have to prove it to us then we will take the complaint and investigate internally ... the act doesn’t allow us to investigate until such time a complaint has been brought to our attention,” Mahlangu says.
“[The Political Party Funding Act] is weak but there is nothing we can do because it is not our legislation.”
Recently the ANC, which declared that it had received a R10m donation in the first quarter of 2022, missed the deadline to declare that donation by one month, prompting the IEC to issue the party with a directive to explain the contravention.
The party was given seven days to submit such a representation, failing which the IEC may impose a sanction on the ANC.
However, Mahlangu said that issuing a sanction for late disclosure of funding would be a last resort as the IEC did not want to be “punitive” regarding new legislation.
“We will see what kind of response they bring to us but they haven't transgressed the legislation before. If someone is repeatedly transgressing the legislation we will probably have to look at punitive measures,” Mahlangu says.
“We are not going to allow political parties to transgress the legislation … but we must invest in training [them] so that they avoid transgressing in future.”
Other declarations made by political parties for the first quarter of 2022 include the DA, which disclosed that it received R16m, the Patriotic Alliance, which received R310,000 and ActionSA, which received R750,000.
“While the current total donations declaration amount of R27m is more than twice the amount declared in quarter four of the previous financial year, it is still relatively low compared to the amounts declared in previous other quarters when parties were preparing for elections,” the IEC says.
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