What did they spend? Party Funding and Election Campaigns in SA …
May 12, 2009
Judith February, IDASA/Bus. Day
 Election 2009: Map showing, for each municipality, the party with the largest number of votes in the National Assembly election. Lighter shades indicate a non-majority plurality. Green: ANC; Blue: DA; Red: IFP |
With the elections over and the African National Congress celebrating its victory, it is clear that, along with the people, the money has also spoken.
Estimates put the ANC’s election spending at between R200 million and R400m. No one can be sure of the actual amount, given the lack of transparency in the funding of political parties.
All political parties seem to agree that transparency is a good thing but appear to lose their appetite when it comes to disclosing their own sources of funding. It has been a case of “show me yours and I’ll show you mine”.
For as much as the ANC has been coy about the sources of its donations, so has the opposition Democratic Alliance – which flooded the Western Cape with posters and, towards the end of its campaign, laid on a helicopter for Helen Zille – been reluctant to disclose its funding sources.
So, the question remains, who will lead the way in closing this gap in South Africa’s transparency regime? Logically, it would have to be the ruling party, with its overwhelming majority in Parliament.
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