Secrecy on party funding leads to skewed policy - Idasa
March 27, 2009
By Donwald Pressly
Because party funding is shrouded in mystery, it allows the refusal to give the Dalai Lama a visa to visit South Africa to be linked to the ANC's receiving of funds from China.
Judith February, head of the Institute for Democracy in SA's political information and monitoring service, told the Cape Town Press Club on Thursday: "It is reasonable to ask whether the ANC as a party received funding from the Chinese government to fund its election campaign."
When asked what could be done about the governing party receiving funding from despotic regimes in Libya and Equatorial Guinea, February said the problem was that party funding was entirely lacking in transparency.
This was so even though Idasa had sued the five major parties in Parliament in 2005 in terms of the Promotion of Access to Information Act.
The court had in effect ruled that the public did not have the right to know about the funding of political parties, as they were regarded as private bodies.
After the high court ruling, President Kgalema Motlanthe, who was the secretary-general of the ruling party at the time, said the ANC believed in transparency and that Parliament would be asked to table legislation regulating political party funding.
"Needless to say, there has been no movement on this issue," February said.
There had been a number of party funding scandals "on all sides of the political divide" in the past decade, she noted.
She said the perception that law makers were law breakers - in the case of the arms deal and the travel voucher scandal known as Travelgate - was problematic. "These have had a dire effect on how the institution of Parliament is viewed."
She said there seemed to be a desire to sweep the Travelgate matter under the carpet - by Parliament buying up Bathong Travel's debtors book - and allow the new Parliament to start with a clean slate after April 22.
A cover-up had been attempted with the arms deal but it remained a fissure in the political landscape, she warned.
Steven Friedman, director of the Centre for the Study of Democracy of Rhodes University and the University of Johannesburg, said there was a view in opposition circles that transparency on funding would drive people away from financing opposition parties because it would offend the ruling party.
He said his was unlikely because wealthy patrons would probably be able to stick to their convictions. Far more dangerous was the fact that arms dealers "can give secret donations" to a party.
Tony Ehrenreich, Western Cape general secretary of ANC-aligned Cosatu, said he believed the principle of openness should rule. The US system, where limits were put on individual and corporate funding, was a good one.
"We need to move towards the primacy of voters' ability to set policy within their parties and not have an outside influence, whether it be a trade union or big business, affecting the democratic process," he said.
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