Ramaphosa takes us back to more secrecy in political funding

ON AUGUST 18, a proclamation signed by President Cyril Ramaphosa to double the disclosure threshold and annual donation limit in the Political Funding Act (PFA) was published in the Government Gazette (No. 53182).

- JOEL BREGMAN

The proclamation is dated August 6 but was only published recently.

The new annual donation limit will be R30million, up from R15m, and the new disclosure threshold will be R200 000, up from R100 000.

This will deepen secrecy in political funding and make it easier for private interests to influence our politics and for corruption to occur.

Politics requires funding and the role parties play in a democratic system is vital. But there needs to be a balance between ensuring that parties are adequately funded, and that such funding is regulated and mitigates the risk of undue influence from donors.

The decision by the president — based on a resolution adopted first by the Portfolio Committee on Home Affairs and then the National Assembly — does not strike such a balance.

It fails to do so because the new limits are not based on empirical, context-specific evidence and research that took balancing factors into consideration. Rather, this is a politically expedient power grab that diminishes our ability to exercise constitutional rights, namely, our political rights (section 19) and our right of access to information (section 32).

What it means for funding

The immediate impact of a higher disclosure threshold and donation limit is that we will have more secrecy in political funding. The details of all donations under R200 000 will not be known to the public.

This is an enormous sum for most South Africans and donations of such amounts should be made public knowledge to facilitate scrutiny of parties’ relationships with donors and ensure that donors are not receiving anything in return.

Further, when a right is to be limited - in this case, the two rights mentioned above — there needs to be adequate justification for doing so.

The state has never provided a legitimate reason why all donations should not be disclosed to the public.