By Jason Felix.
ActionSA has proposed giving the Electoral Commission of SA (IEC) access to the bank accounts of political parties to prevent them from holding events that cost millions of rand, even though they only declare a few thousand.
On Monday, ActionSA’s national chairperson Michael Beaumont said proper accountability was fundamentally missing.
He was speaking ahead of My Vote Counts’ (MVC) Western Cape High Court application to have the Political Party Funding Act declared unconstitutional.
“But if My Vote Counts gets its way today, this is going to be a threat to our multi-party democracy and it’s going to entrench the status quo in a country that is rejecting the status quo, and that is what we are actually here to fight against,” he added.
Beaumont said access to bank accounts had to be a key part of the equation: We have to have a situation where those who are there to enforce the legislation and party funding can see what is going on in these accounts because there is no way you can look at political parties that are spending tens of millions of rand on one event and they’re declaring R300 000. That simply doesn’t smell right.
MVC is asking the court to declare the Political Party Funding Act (PPFA), as amended by the Electoral Matters Amendment Act (EMAA), invalid and unconstitutional because it fails to require the disclosure of all private donations received by and made to parties, and fails to impose adequate controls on the private funding of parties.
The DA and ActionSA the Ministers of Home Affairs and Justice and Constitutional Development, and Parliament are opposing the application.
According to Beaumont, the IEC needs to be given proper investigative powers.
“What the legislators basically did is say: ‘IEC, you must investigate cases,’ but the lEC has no background, capacity, institutional DNA in the areas of investigation. In fact, it’s put them in a terrible position because their job is to be a non-partisan player in the electoral space and now they have to be the referees investigating these cases as well, which puts them in an invidious position.
“Among other things, [this has] indicated that there has to be much harsher punishments for wrongdoing. What we saw two years ago is a number of political parties, including the ANC, didn’t file financial audits as is required in law,” Beaumont added.