Still no deadline for implementation of party funding transparency laws

8 November 2019

On Wednesday, the Promotion of Access to Information Amendment Bill (the Amendment Bill) was adopted by Parliament’s National Assembly, unopposed, and must now be introduced in Parliament’s National Council of Provinces (NCOP) for concurrence. This amendment was required in order for Parliament to fulfil the June 2018 Constitutional Court ruling in the matter of MVC NPC vs the Minister of Justice & Others, ordering Parliament to amend the Promotion of Access to Information Act (PAIA) by December 2019. The Court declared PAIA unconstitutional to the extent that it failed to regulate the recordal, preservation and reasonable disclosure of information on the private funding of political parties and independent candidates. 

The Court confirmed that Section 32(1b) of the Constitution, read with the Section 19 Constitutional right to make political choices, protects the right to have access to information on the private funding of political parties and independent candidates in order for the vote to be effectively exercised. Seeing as PAIA is the legislation that gives effect to Section 32 of the Constitution, it is PAIA, specifically, that the Court ordered Parliament to amend to facilitate access to information on party funding. 

In 2016, after activists made PAIA applications to political parties, requesting their private funding information, all parties rejected these requests. Thereafter, My Vote Counts (MVC) first took this matter to the Western Cape High Court. At this point, Parliament had not yet undertaken any efforts to draft legislation for the transparency of records on the sources and amounts of political parties and independent candidates private funding. MVC strongly felt that the united efforts of civil society and the litigation process initiated by MVC, pressured Parliament to eventually start taking steps in 2017 to regulate the transparency of political parties’ private funding information by drafting the Political Party Funding Act (PPFA), signed by President Cyril Ramaphosa in January of this year. 

Nonetheless, regardless of the PPFA being signed, Parliament still had to fulfill their obligation to amend PAIA before the end of this year. MVC had hoped that if not through PPFA, after the December 2019 deadline ordered by the Court for PAIA’s amendment, political parties coffers would no longer be concealed. However, the Promotion of Access to Information Amendment Bill, adopted yesterday in the National Assembly, has been drafted in a way that it dovetails with the PPFA. Therefore, PAIA alone cannot provide the relevant information, unless the PPFA is implemented in order for Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) and political parties to be obligated to collect and disclose the records containing the relevant information. 

There is no known deadline for the IEC to start implementing the PPFA and if President Cyril Ramaphosa does not promulgate a date for the PPFA’s implementation, South Africans cannot be assured that the PPFA or any amendments to PAIA will result in the disclosure of the sources and amounts of private funding to political parties and independent candidates before the 2021 local government elections.

Without a gazetted date for the PPFA, the President is complicit in stalling efforts towards a more transparent and accountable political and electoral system. The consequences of secret private interests on the country’s body politic has fuelled politicians to serve at the behest of the wealthy elite and patronage networks, as opposed to serving in the best interests of the public. 

We would like to urge all sectors of our society to pressure the President to promulgate a date for the PPFA’s implementation. The infringement on the human rights of the largely poor South African majority to make an informed vote means that the President is showing more loyalty to donors of parties, at the expense of the public interest. There is no “New Dawn” in sight for our country as the corrosive impact of corruption and state capture cannot be tackled if transparency and accountability mechanisms are not put in place to deter and expose the undue influence of corrupt private interests.

Issued by Sheilan Clarke, Communications Officer, My Vote Counts, 8 November 2019