The Institute for Democracy in South Africa (Idasa) is to ask all political parties for information on private party funding, in terms of the Access to Information Act.
Idasa political analyst Richard Calland told reporters on Wednesday letters would be sent to all 13 political parties represented in Parliament within the next few days.
”I think the request is going to challenge political parties’ commitment to openness and their commitment to fight against corruption.”
Currently, taxpayers were paying money into a ”black hole”, with no knowledge of the extent to which parties were being ”purchased or bought by private wealth”, he said. Political parties receive public funding according to the size of their support base, and are free to receive direct or indirect financial support from members and from other sources, such as business and civil society groupings.
According to Calland, the African National Congress received about R60-million over the past election periods in 1999/2000. Idasa hoped the requests for information would encourage greater reform regarding private political donations.
”Having dallied for four or five years around this question, there is now need to encourage them to take the question of reform more seriously.”
Idasa would be asking for information on the number of private donations made since May 1994, and since 1999 for those parties that entered Parliament after the most recent election. It would request the date of each such donation; records of the amount or the value of each donation; and would ask for the identity of the donor in each case.
Calland said two sets of requests would be sent; one assuming the organisation was a private body and another for a public entity.
”In most countries, they can just say ‘go away we are a private entity and the law does not apply to us’, but there is an argument about that suggests that political parties are private entities with a public face.
”We would argue that the linkage between the public money, the taxpayer and the political party gives them a public face, a public component to their character, to justify the argument that they are public entities.”
Even if the parties won the argument that they were private entities, they were still exposed to obligations under the Access to Information Act, he said. ”We would simply have to show that there was another right that needed to be protected or exercised which justifies our request for the records.”
”And, the rights that we will be putting forward are the rights of political equality… that wealthy people can buy influence through their donations and thus create an inequality in political action and influence,” Calland said. – Sapa