ANTHONY BUTLER: Gwede Mantashe calls for NGOs to reveal funding

First published in Business Day

 

13 OCTOBER 2023

Gwede Mantashe has been causing trouble again. On Tuesday, at the Africa Oil Week conference in Cape Town, the mineral resources & energy minister accused foreign-funded nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) of weaponising environmental protection to block economic development in SA. He demanded that such NGOs be registered and “made to declare their source of funding”. 

This could just be an attempt to protect unionised workers in fossil fuel industries, or perhaps to nurture multinational oil and gas companies whose local black empowerment partners donate to the ANC.  

But the governing party has long anticipated tighter controls on NGOs. When the liberation movement’s self-taught epidemiologists decided that the “invention” of HIV/Aids was a plot by international drug companies, the Treatment Action Campaign came under heavy attack.  

At the ANC’s 2007 conference at Polokwane delegates resolved to establish a regulatory architecture for private funding of “political parties and civil society groups”. It took 15 years to get around to parties, but NGOs were always destined to follow. 

There are disturbing global trends. Over the past quarter century, 70 countries have implemented laws limiting foreign funding to NGOs. Former Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe was once again ahead of his time, noting in 2008 that foreign funds are “channelled through nongovernmental organisations to opposition parties, which are a creation of the West”.

More than a dozen African countries have since constrained NGO funding. Indeed, such a crackdown is all the rage globally, in capitals from New Delhi to Budapest, wherever globally connected NGOs threaten to undermine incumbent leaders’ electoral prospects.  

There are, of course, valid criticisms of international and foreign-funded NGOs. They are often paternalistic and tend to advance the interests of their funders. By pursuing certain projects — for example in HIV/Aids treatment — they can inadvertently fragment local health systems and monopolise scarce human resources.  

However, on the colonial spectrum between district commissioner and missionary (on which we can surely situate the personnel of all Western-funded NGOs) most of these organisations are at the do-gooder end — and they are genuinely doing good.

Such NGOs are effective operational entities, providing goods and services that under-capacitated governments simply cannot deliver on their own, and reaching citizens who otherwise lack access to public programmes. 

Democratic and authoritarian governments alike are dependent on NGOs to provide public services, and to access international health, educational and scientific expertise. Governments nervous about emerging Chinese and Russian funding in the West, for example in Ottawa and Canberra, have also been clamping down on international funding.  

The biggest problem for our sensitive local elite is a subset of advocacy NGOs that campaign openly against human rights abuses, corruption and incompetence, and seek to change government policy through legal challenges, media campaigns and demonstrations. It is true that such organisations are not elected. But the real problem is that they do not have to bow and scrape before government ministers.  

Of course, some local politicians believe they alone have an uncanny ability to discern the real interests of the masses. They resent the impertinence of organisations that consult and organise the people directly. Given that Mantashe is at the more reasonable end of the political spectrum in the ANC, though, it would be prudent for advocacy NGOs to do precisely what he suggests: openly and religiously declare who is funding them.  

Maintaining legitimacy in an untrusting world demands more from NGOs than just being open and doing good. They need to be seen to be doing good and to be open. Otherwise, a well-meaning civil society organisation can easily be accused of insalubrious and nefarious activities or find itself unfairly embroiled in scandals about money laundering and political influence.

One prominent example of such injustice in recent years, of course, has been the Gwede Mantashe Foundation. 

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.