South Africa’s new party funding law has been touted as a much-needed solution to the country’s mounting political scandals and crises of government. Many applaud this new law as an instrument to expose the corrupt dealings between political parties and their private donors. Kickbacks to secret donors that bankroll political parties might be illegal but is the norm among big parties in parliament. It is hoped that the Political Party Funding Act (2021) will at least expose if not totally cleanse the political system of rampant dodgy dealings, ‘tenderpreneurship’ and corruption.

Some backers of this law, such as the Council for the Advancement of the South African Constitution (CASAC), also stress that reforming the regulation of private donations to political parties can only ‘strengthen the country’s multiparty democracy’. These champions of the liberal values in the 1996 Constitution are not just cheering the corruption busting potential of the party funding law. Advocates and lobbyists for ‘accountable multiparty democracy’ want to maintain the capitalist socio-political system in its totality, including the legitimacy of its state apparatus and glamorous electoral contests. They cherish the rules of democratic governance in North America and Western Europe, the imperialist heartlands, as their models. But in these so-called mature modern democracies, the shameless subservience of political parties to the domination of private corporations have reached new levels of obscenity. Under these conditions far-right politicians, with enormous monetary power behind them, have seized control over the state to subjugate society to authoritarian terror, as in Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro.

Technocratic rules in South Africa’s newly amended party funding act define legal donations (financial and non-financial) that a political party can accept and how parties that fall foul of the legislation’s prescripts might be punished. The Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) is responsible for implementing the new law, impose fines on its violators, etc. According to the Act, political parties do not need to disclose donations below R100,000. This minimum disclosure threshold should not be confused with the maximum amount in donations a party can accept. The maximum that any individual entity can donate is R15 million. Furthermore, foreign entities are allowed to donate to a maximum of R5 million, but with marginal restrictions. Parties can invest funds not meant for immediate use into the Public Investment Corporation and must obtain approval to roll over donations from one year to next. The bookkeeping would be similar to accounting for millions in public funding that parties in national and provincial parliaments already receive from the IEC – R158 million for the 2019/2020 period!

In effect, the new party funding regulations promote strictly commercial transactions between private donors and political parties. This means that compliant political parties, without violating this law or slipping through its flaws and loopholes, can exploit it to its own benefit and grow into wealthy political corporations. Indeed, bourgeois parliamentary politics has become big business, with its corporate culture, nauseating elitism, business secrets and other shenanigans.

The intimate liaisons between parties in parliament and the private business world are very common and can assume varied shades, as detailed in revelations at the Commission into State Capture (Zondo Commission). As a case in point, the Zuma-Gupta saga is literally an introduction to the underworld of politician-and-business tycoon networks. Whilst Cyril Ramaphosa has been a recipient of tainted money from Bosasa, leaders in the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) have been implicated in looting VBS Mutual Bank for their celebrity lifestyles. Add to this the Steinhoff-Democratic Alliance scandal. Only after Steinhoff’s longstanding financial crimes made headline news, did the DA’s former leader, Musi Maimane, return the Toyota SUV gift he had received from this disgraced sponsor of sports teams. In fact, the DA is notorious for hiding its private financial sources. Dion George, DA federal finance chairperson, boldly reiterated his party’s standpoint on their fundraising campaign for the upcoming local elections: “Yes, we have a budget and fundraising target and prefer not to share it. No, we don’t disclose our donations”. (Daily Maverick Online, Hot Political Money…, 14/01/2021)

It is well known that wealthy individuals who own shares in big businesses, like Cyril Ramaphosa and Tito Mboweni, are high-profile leaders of the governing ANC. Similarly, EFF leaders such as Julius Malema and Marshall Dlamini, flaunt their business interests and aspirations to usurp ‘white monopoly capitalists’. These are the savvy new elites that shuttle between parliamentary seats and the corporate boardrooms. Would it not be naïve and absurd to dream that these wealthy members (‘nouveau bourgeoisie’) of political parties will not help finance the insidious activities of their parties? It remains unclear whether a sliding scale of subscriptions for party members will be illegal under the party funding law.

Modern capitalists and their farsighted political henchmen accept the need for state power to protect their class interests and suppress the labouring majority. When rival factions of capitalists put their financial muscle behind a specific party, then they count it as an ‘investment’ serving multiple purposes. A capitalist bets on a political party to do its bidding in government first and foremost. But it also wants to reinforce false hopes in bourgeois parliamentary representation among oppressed and exploited people, hence the intensive media disinformation campaigns. Financing mainstream media helps them combat the disillusionment and outrage among the masses in liberal representative democracy, from switching to its total rejection in favour of socialist democracy. The latest reforms to political party funding seek to perpetuate this fraud.

Anti-capitalist political forces cannot just unmask and reject the cosmetic tinkering with the domination of big money over political parties, whether inside or outside parliament. Yes, this helps to shatter illusions in parliamentary politics and shows how ‘he-who-pays-the-piper-calls-the-tune’ works in real life. Crucial as such exposures might be, they do not, as isolated acts go far enough. A practical question that anti-capitalist movements must face up to is how to use the full franchise, a major gain from our defeat of the supremacist minority dictatorship, as a weapon in ongoing struggles for socialist democracy. It is not a call to abstain from politics, elections and parliament. On the contrary, the task is to mobilise and unite the self-organised power of the oppressed and exploited majority against all inequalities, injustices and repression. APDUSA says that the labouring classes need our own political party under our direct political control, based on a political programme and policy independent of the influences of our enemies.