The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) presented its submission on the Political Party Funding Act’s Donation Limit and Threshold Disclosure to Parliament’s Portfolio Committee: Home Affairs today. 

The Federation supports the Political Party Funding Act, a decisive intervention by government led by President Cyril Ramaphosa and the African National Congress to uproot the cancers of state capture and corruption that threatens the very fabric of our democracy.  This progressive Act is a key weapon in the war against state capture and corruption.

COSATU appreciates the important role that political parties play in building our hard-won constitutional democracy and representing the concerns and aspirations of voters.  Running election campaigns is extremely expensive, especially for large parties like the ANC, amongst others, with structures across all 4 468 municipal wards. 

The ability of the state to fund the costs of political parties is extremely limited in the current fiscal pressures.  Ideally the state should cover the costs of running elected political parties to shield them from being dependent on unscrupulous donations, but it will take time for the state to be able to meet this correct objective.

The current limit on donations that can be given to political parties in a single year is R15 million.  This amount has not been adjusted since 2018, has been substantially eroded by inflation and thus needs to be raised accordingly.  In future it should be adjusted annually to take into account CPI.

COSATU is however deeply opposed to calls to raise the threshold of R100 000 below which donations need not be disclosed by political parties.  It is critical that funding for political parties be disclosed if we are to shield our body politic and government from state capture and corruption.  The danger of a high threshold of R100 000 is that persons with dubious motives simply donate R99 000 to circumvent the Act’s disclosure requirements.  Any increase in the threshold will be a regressive step backwards and threaten the Act’s progressive transparency requirements.  At the very least the threshold must be maintained, ideally it must be lowered to R10 000.  This would be a fair and sober compromise in exchange for raising the cap on donations to parties.

We hope Parliament will adopt a balanced approach that raises the cap on donations to enable parties to raise sufficient funds to fulfill their roles, whilst protecting and tightening the threshold for the disclosure of donations.  We dare not move backwards on building a culture of transparency and accountability in our body politic, more so when workers are paying the painful price for the decade of state capture and corruption.

Issued by COSATU

Matthew Parks(COSATU Parliamentary Coordinator)

Cell: 082 785 0687

Email: matthew@cosatu.org.za