Corruption Watch has made written submissions to the Independent Electoral Commission on their proposed regulations to the Political Party Funding Act. This follows the organisation’s oral and written submissions to Parliament during 2017, on the Political Party Funding Bill.
The commission is holding public hearings into the draft regulations for the Political Party Funding Act on 1 and 2 August.
Our submissions focus on the need to ensure that the framework around political party funding is as transparent as possible. To this end, we made two broad suggestions to the commission:
- that their regulations on allowing donors to the Multi-Party Democracy Fund to remain anonymous be tightened to ensure there is no possibility that anonymous donors might abuse the process to influence the policy of the largest represented party; and
- that their regulations relating to the record of disclosure of donors and donations from political parties be broadened so that there is greater accessibility – in other words, by introducing regulations to allow access to the record online, to require more regular reporting by the commission of the list of donation disclosures they receive, and to require the parties themselves to make available their record of disclosure.
“The recommendations made by Corruption Watch are underpinned by our belief that transparency of the political party funding process and access to all information related to the donations received by political parties and the Multi-Party Democracy Fund is vital in protecting the integrity of South Africa’s democracy and electoral process,” said the organisation’s head of legal and investigations, Deborah Mutemwa-Tumbo.
