The African National Congress is obviously a very well-off organisation: R50 000 is clearly small fry to it. A cheque for this amount was sent to the party by Anglo Platinum in 1999/2000. But according to the records of the company the cheque was not banked, it expired and was never reissued.
This fact lends succour to the proposition that those with a more seasoned, and certainly more intimate knowledge of the ANC, encourage me to accept: that when assessing cause and effect, in the case of the ANC, “conspiracy” is rarely the cause and invariably “cock-up” is.
One can just imagine. The cheque comes in, sits around, and gets trapped in some sort of bureaucratic mangle. It expires, and rather than admit an error, some hapless party official quietly finds a convenient carpet under which to slide it. Anglo Platinum has to find an accounting explanation for this rather surprising event: that someone doesn’t have the capacity to accept its cash.
This probably explains why in the following two years the company chose to issue bigger cheques — R200 000 last year and R210 000 this year — presumably in the hope that the ruling party would feel obliged to take greater care of a larger donation (though to be precise, in the year of the forgotten cheque the ANC did manage to accept R90 000 from the company for various other things, such as R40 000 sponsorship for the South African Communist Party/ ANC conference).
I know this because Anglo Platinum has responded wisely to our (the Institute for Democracy in South Africa’s) request for records of donations made to political parties, under the provisions of the Promotion of Access to Information Act 2000. Our requests for these records are showing how the transparency law can illuminate the political process and also in a positive way prompt reform.
Because of its far-reaching conceptualisation, the Act provides for the right to access to private information where it is necessary to protect or exercise another right. Equality is at issue here. Can it be right, in an open and democratic society, that rich citizens or corporations can secretly donate to parties and, thereby, potentially buy influence over policy, while the poor have by definition no such opportunity? I think not.
There is no shame in giving money to political parties openly, especially where the bet is spread, so to speak, as with Anglo Platinum’s approach of giving to four or five parties a year. Another major company, Gencor, responded within just two days of the request by disclosing donations totalling R1,3-million between 1994 and 1998, to the National Party and the Democratic Party. Why it chose to stop in 1998 is as interesting as why it chose to donate only to those two opposition parties.
Like Gencor, Anglo Platinum deserves credit because it has chosen the open road. It could have chosen secrecy, as SABMiller has done. The giant transnational beverage company’s attorneys acknowledge that “funding was provided to a spread of political parties around the four elections that have taken place since early 1994 in order to help build and strengthen democratic structures … with the object of providing much needed support for a fledgling democracy”, yet decline to provide any details of how much and to whom.
If the motive is so altruistic, what is the point of concealing the donations?
What has it got to hide? It fails to appreciate that secrecy prompts suspicion, whereas openness encourages trust.
I am not suggesting that every time a consumer chooses a beer from now on he or she is going to say, well, SAB is a bit too secretive about its donations to political parties for my liking, therefore I think I’ll have a Windhoek. But at a time when corporate governance has never before been under such an intense spotlight globally, the question of what is and is not socially responsible corporate conduct has begun to matter more.
Werkmans makes the following rather astonishing statement on behalf of its client SABMiller: “… in so far as the right contained in Section 18 of the Constitution, which guarantees every one the ‘right to freedom of association’, our client’s rights to associate with whomever it pleases and in whatsoever form it deems desirable must be respected”.
Did it intend to offer such an emphatic description of poor corporate governance — straight from the “we will do what we damn well like” Enron school of corporate social responsibility? I am not sure if it is the arrogance of the tone, or the neglect of the concept of limitation of rights: where it is reasonable and justifiable in an open and democratic society, rights may be limited, as the South African Constitution recognises.
Upholding American laws requiring open disclosure and limits on private donations, the United States Supreme Court has agreed; other rights relating to donations — the right to privacy, to free expression through donations and to free assembly — can and should be constrained in order to protect the integrity of the political process.
But as the centre’s director Larry Noble points out, at least the requirement for open disclosure allows us to evaluate President George W Bush’s policymaking in the light of the knowledge of who has bankrolled him. This is the accountability that transparency delivers.
In a recent speech Noble reminded me of the long-forgotten but fundamentally important fact about corporations: they are our creation. Company laws, passed by our representatives with our collective consent, provide the crucial “corporate shield” — the notion of limited liability — that in turn enables companies to be entrepreneurial in the pursuit of profit for their investors and shareholders.
That is our gift to them; it does not bequeath on them secret sanctity for the conduct they deem desirable. Some companies, such as Impala Platinum, Richemont and Anglo American, tell us that they have made no donations to political parties since 1994 and that it is not their practice to do so. The latter adds that because it is London-listed it is now required under the terms of the new Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000 to disclose any “political donations” in its annual reports. Quite right too; shareholders have the right to know what is being donated. After one funding scandal too many, the United Kingdom has been driven to reform. South Africa has not had that impetus, though both the Harksen affair and one or two of the arms deal allegations that went unproven with former defence minister Joe Modise to his grave, suggest that this country should not linger much longer before it covers this particular lacuna.
The major parties have recently offered commitments to reform, in line with the African Union Declaration, which calls on all member countries to regulate private party funding. Tailoring a law to suit South Africa is the next challenge; getting the threshold for disclosing donations at a level that does not deter smallish donors to opposition parties, for example, requires careful consideration.
Overall the government has done very well since 1994 in its efforts to combat corruption. The largest remaining gap must now be closed: whether the recipient party can be bothered to cash it or not, the need for money in politics should not give corporations a blank cheque to exert secret influence.
Archive: Previous columns by Richard Calland