There are two major issues to emerge from the morass of the arms deal investigation that require immediate and careful attention.
First, the potentially corrosive relationship between party political funding and the democratic process demands that the yawning chasm of non-regulation that is the current position in South Africa be remedied.
Second, attaining the constitutional aspiration of meaningful parliamentary oversight of the executive arm of government is an apparently evasive goal. The executive’s response to the attempted exercise of oversight by the standing committee on public accounts suggests that a profound assessment of how best to institutionalise a culture of oversight that is insulated from the acute pressure of party political imperative is necessary.
Happily, an immediate opportunity to commence a consideration of the options in respect of both matters is at hand. Starting on February 1 the Institute for Democracy in South Africa (Idasa) is hosting a double seminar that will examine each challenge in turn. Whether or not it is subsequently proven that the African National Congress as a party benefited from the arms procurement deal, the case for greater transparency in relation to the private funding of all political parties must be heard loud and clear.
The issue is less about corruption than political equality. As United Kingdom Labour Party MP Martin Linton, one of the participants next week, wrote in 1994: “Political equality is fundamental to a democratic system. People are unequal in the marketplace, but they are equal in the polling booth and this political equality is an essential counterweight to their economic inequality. But this works only as long as the wealthy cannot use their economic power to buy or to corrupt political power. Thus it is a basic requirement of a democracy that political power should be insulated from economic power.”
Linton wrote just as a series of financial scandals emerged to hit the then Tory government. Most infamous of the various cases was the “cash- for-questions” allegations against the vainglorious Tory MP Neil Hamilton and one of his colleagues, in which both had accepted bundles of cash in return for tabling parliamentary questions that served the commercial interests of their paymasters.
Hamilton subsequently lost his “safe” seat at the 1997 general election to independent MP and former BBC journalist Martin Bell (who is also participating next week). Bell was a symbol of the need to cleanse British politics, a process that had already been started belatedly by prime minister John Major before he lost power, with the establishment of a commission to investigate and report on standards in public life.
The commission found that British political life had been corroded by the failure to deal with conflicts of interest. Democracy had been seriously discredited and dangerously undermined. A new system of transparency and parliamentary disclosure of interests soon followed. But party political funding was left untouched. Six years later, following its own problems with donations, the new Labour government of Tony Blair has finally grappled with the nettle.
A new Bill regulating party funding is soon to become law. Britain is not alone among the northern democracies to have suffered party political funding scandals. More recent examples include the uncovering of chancellor Helmut Kohl’s use of secret slush funds; the allegations of state contracts being offered to a Swiss building company by Russian president Boris Yeltsin in exchange for monetary donations; and the likely investigation into illegal donations by China to the Democratic Party for Bill Clinton’s re-election campaign in 1996.
What, then, of South Africa? It is a mixed picture. On the one hand, Parliament took the initiative early after 1994 by developing its own strong rules requiring the disclosure of financial interests by MPs. But the political science literature supports the reality that one can see and which the uncomfortable position of the ANC members of the public accounts committee this past week illustrates: that in the modern age, political parties are far more powerful than individual parliamentarians.
Hence the irony. South Africa has one of the world’s strongest regimes in terms of the rules regulating the financial disclosure of private interests of individual MPs but absolutely no regulation whatsoever in relation to donations to parties. We do not know who funds the ANC or the Democratic Alliance. We know that the parties spent millions on the election campaigns in the past two years, but we have very little idea how all the posters and radio adverts were paid for.
We do not, therefore, know which companies are able to buy influence and favour by making donations to those parties that have the power to make decisions affecting everyone. Are those policy choices being made on the basis of what is best for all, or what is best for the company or companies who made donations to the party? We simply don’t know and have no way of knowing (perhaps not surprisingly, not a single party makes voluntary disclosure).
This democratic defect is compounded by virtue of the fact that the South African taxpayer now contributes to the costs of running political parties, through the system established by the 1997 Public Funding of Represented Political Parties Act. About R45-million was allocated to the ANC and the DA from public coffers in the past financial year, out of an overall budget of R55-million.
Small fry compared with the cost of modernising the military and not enough to pay for all those posters and adverts by a long way (Idasa estimates that the bigger parties spend at least these amounts again, presumably from private donations), but significant nonetheless.
Public funding of political parties is a constitutional requirement, intended to promote multiparty democracy. It is a worthy aspiration that recognises that political competition should be a contest of ideas, not money (and that parties need money to operate and put themselves in a position to persuade the voter with their ideas); but it is now tainted. The public funding is supposed to be on the basis of two principles, proportionality (the percentage of votes at the last election) and equity.
In the absence of transparency about private funding it is impossible to begin to evaluate the question of equity, which is intended to offer a “leg-up” to smaller, poorer parties. In 1997 the Democratic Party was certainly small, but unlike the Pan Africanist Congress with a similar share of the 1994 vote, it equally certainly was not poor. There is a myriad of different ways to cut the regulatory cake. Caps on donations; disclosure above a certain level; caps on election spending; blind or open trusts.
As with the parliamentary ethics code, South Africa must make rules that suit its socio-political context. The complexity of that context makes the challenge greater but it is no excuse for putting heads into the sand. First, the political will must be summoned across the party political spectrum. In this matter, as with arms dealing, secrecy is harmful. Period.
Richard Calland is head of Idasa’s political information and monitoring service, which hosts a double seminar starting on February 1 titled Money and Power and Parliamentary Oversight. For full programme see www.pims. org.za/democracy2000 or contact [email protected]