The Political Party Funding Act, which was signed into law by President Cyril Ramaphosa in 2019, is expected to come into force in the first quarter of the year.
The Act compels political parties to be transparent about the donations they receive. According to BusinessLive some other key elements of the Act are ‘a ban on donations from foreign sources and a requirement that parties disclose all donations above a certain threshold. It also establishes a multiparty democracy fund, which is new and will fund political parties represented in the National Assembly from private sources’.
An NGO, Corruption Watch, said that it had written to President Ramaphosa to ask him to implement the Act, so that it would come into force before this year’s local government elections. By law they cannot be held later than early November this year.
Said Karam Singh, Corruption Watch’s head of legal and investigations: ‘The matter of political party funding is important in our democracy, and of significant public interest, as voters have the right to a level of transparency about the groups and individuals backing specific parties and their agendas.’
The influence of money in South African democracy has been brought to light with a number of revelations coming out of the ongoing Commission of Inquiry into State Capture.