ANTHONY BUTLER: Most party funding flies below the radar

Legislation casts light on large contributions; the rest are received in small batches or black bags

First published in Business Day

17 MAY 2024 – 05:00

There has been much hand-wringing about the effective suspension of the Political Party Funding Act in the run-up to the May 29 elections.

Former minister of constitutional development Mohammed Valli Moosa, who ushered the legislation through parliament, described it in 2020 as “the biggest advancement of our democratic order since the adoption of the constitution”. In reality, however, this was always a lousy law, one that has done almost nothing to change the relationship between money and politics in SA.

The key elements of the act have been a R15m-a-year cap on any donor’s contributions to a party, and the disclosure of donations of R100,000 and above in the Electoral Commission’s quarterly declarations reports.

These documents are not entirely without interest. If we look at the past seven quarterly reports, the ANC has benefited handsomely from party-linked investment vehicles. Batho Batho Trust, which through its stake in Thebe Investments has partnered Shell and Eskom coal supply chain beneficiary Seriti, has donated R30m in less than two years.

Chancellor House (CH), meanwhile, gave R22.5m. Moosa knows CH well because he was both Eskom chair and a member of the ANC’s fundraising committee when Hitachi Africa, in which CH held a 25% stake as BEE partner, was awarded huge contracts for the ultimately dysfunctional boilers at the Medupi and Kusile power stations. CH is now empowerment partner and majority shareholder in Russia-adjacent United Manganese of Kalahari, which has separately donated R15m.

DA donors include multiple “Fynbos” vehicles associated with banker Michiel Le Roux, which have together given up to R30m a year. Australian-domiciled gambling mogul Martin Moshal also donates in R15m doses, and various Oppenheimers have together given more than R10m.

ActionSA leader Herman Mashaba has enjoyed the benevolence of Oppenheimer descendants to the tune of more than R30m, while Mmusi Maimane’s Build One SA has been blessed by funds from Moshal (R4m), Mary Slack (R5m) and Jessica Slack-Jell (R6m), and Songezo Zibi’s RISE Mzansi has been gifted R15m by Rebecca Oppenheimer.

Impressive though they sound, these payments, amounting to perhaps R200m a year, constitute a small proportion of party receipts. Nomvula Mokonyane told us that the ANC spent R1bn on the 2016 elections, and this can only have gone up. Journalists’ focus on big and declared donors ignores most funds entering politics.

Parties receive more than R170m a year from the Represented Political Parties Fund. The national parliament and provincial legislatures vote themselves eight times as much in additional funds for “constituency support” and other activities, for which there is little or no accountability. According to one study, this has amounted to almost R17bn since 2009.

Many big businesses — including illegal tobacco and alcohol suppliers — do not reveal their donations to political parties because their activities cannot be declared to the revenue service.

Moosa championed plastic bag legislation when he was environmental affairs minister, but his party funding framework takes no account of the black plastic bags stuffed with cash that have featured prominently in liberation movement history. Some of SA’s closest diplomatic friends, moreover, have proved willing to transfer cash in diplomatic bags, especially when marketing large items such as nuclear power stations.

Opposition donors are generally fearful of transparency because they do not want to be punished for donating, and many ANC donors do not want to flag their relationships to the party. For this reason, most single donations are kept below R100,000, and larger amounts are broken up and gifted by multiple, but linked, donors.

The act has so far brought only selective exposure of a specific category of donors. Parties will need a change of heart and concerted action if this situation is ever to be improved.

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

ANTHONY BUTLER: ANC’s depleted war chest means less vote-buying

The party finds itself unable to do what it used to to ensure it draws voters

First published in Business Day

03 MAY 2024

As parties ramp up their activity in the final weeks of the election campaign, most political analysts expect the ANC to close the gap between the party’s current opinion poll showing and the 50%-plus it requires to govern alone.

A last-minute rally has been a feature of previous elections. Ministers set aside their official duties and devote the last few weeks of the campaign to bold promises about the future and the unveiling of infrastructure projects. Union members desert classrooms and municipal offices to provide organisational support, and traditional leaders and churches are seduced by last-minute blandishments.

A late funding drive once secured big donations from business to a party whose victory was inevitable. State communications budgets were diverted to advertise ANC achievements, and the party’s foot soldiers were deployed to get grudging loyalists to the polls.

Such a late surge will be far harder to realise this time round though. To paraphrase President Cyril Ramaphosa’s reflections in a timely national executive committee leak a few weeks ago, senior comrades have not yet pulled their fingers out.

Moreover, without Jacob Zuma the ANC leadership’s links with traditional leaders are less certain than before. Some chiefs have been showered with bakkies to secure their support.

ANC leaders are sometimes caught simply dishing out cash to potential voters. In advance of the 2021 elections then treasurer-general Paul Mashatile was seen handing banknotes to congregants at a church service in Makhado. He was able to assure observers that he was merely distributing “tithe offerings”.

The ANC’s war chest has been empty, in part because Luthuli House spends almost R1bn a year on salaries for redundant cadres. Incumbent treasurer-general Gwen Ramokgopa is even more ethically scrupulous than her predecessors, Mashatile and Zweli Mkhize, and this may be hampering fund-raising.

Despite repeated episodes of near bankruptcy, mysterious transfers always arrive to rescue Luthuli House. It is fortunate that deputy secretary-general Nomvula Mokonyane is chair of both the ANC’s elections and campaigning and its international relations committees. This allows her to seek guidance from other global revolutionary parties about how to secure the seemingly undeclared funds the ANC needs to remain solvent.

This year there are few expensive government projects to be unveiled by ministers bedecked in party colours because of the National Treasury’s emergency expenditure caps.

The situation has been made worse by the fact that some ANC ministers are no longer competent enough to abuse state funds effectively. For example, labour & employment minister Thulas Nxesi has been trying for months to divert more than R20bn of Unemployment Insurance Fund monies into a moribund labour activation programme for distribution to various job opportunity schemes. The money is only just reaching doubtless deserving beneficiaries in key battleground states such as Gauteng.

Other ANC leaders, including Gauteng premier Panyaza Lesufi and Ekurhuleni mayor Nkosindiphile Xhakaza, have announced their own “job creation” jaunts using money that does not seem to exist.

On the ground, campaign narratives have meanwhile developed a bizarre character, with load-shedding attributed to the ANC’s success in connecting so many poor people to the grid — or even to the dastardly Europeans’ insistence that we shut down perfectly serviceable coal-fired power stations.

Traditional scare stories are back, with claims that opposition parties will scrap the National Student Financial Aid Scheme and social grants.

Worst of all, the ANC’s ground machinery is in disarray. Membership numbers are down and many branches are inactive. Political scientists have used an innovative “party presence index” to show that the ANC’s famed branch level organisation is far less impressive than once believed.

This time round, a few late posters may not be enough to keep the sinking ANC ship afloat.

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

ANTHONY BUTLER: President Samson Gwede Mantashe has a ring to it

First published in Business Day and BusinessLive

22 MARCH 2024

A persistent rumour, troubling to some international investors, suggests that President Cyril Ramaphosa could stand down after the upcoming elections. 

Most local observers sensibly view this as implausible. It is true that Ramaphosa was said to have indicated a desire to leave office after the Phala Phala scandal broke. Speechwriters were apparently instructed to write resignation orations, and ANC chair Gwede Mantashe supposedly had to talk his friend out of throwing in the towel. Talk was that once they had considered the dire alternatives, ANC leaders — and many others — rallied round the embattled occupant of the Union Buildings.

Whatever the real story, Ramaphosa still has the job he always wanted. He first declared that he was going to be president more than 50 years ago, as a teenager at a Christian camp on the banks of the Hartbeespoort Dam. He evidently does not yet feel that he has a legacy, and he will surely use any, and all, available time to establish one. 

Those who nonetheless still fear his early departure tend to see deputy president Paul Mashatile as his likely replacement. This may be a miscalculation. The position of ANC deputy president offers no guarantee of succeeding to the presidency. While three deputies in the final term of a sitting president have indeed risen to the highest office since 1994, a law cannot be derived from three cases. 

The ANC rotates offices between regions. Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki were nominally associated with the Eastern Cape, Jacob Zuma with KwaZulu-Natal, and Ramaphosa with Gauteng and Limpopo. Mashatile is also strongly associated with Gauteng, which currently occupies most of the “top seven” offices. Yet the province is only third or fourth in terms of ANC delegate numbers, and it is about to tank in the provincial elections.

Moreover, investigative journalists claim to have uncovered skeletons in Mashatile’s closet. However unjust these accusations may turn out to be — who among us hasn’t occasionally been uncertain who owns the mansions they live in? — the rattling of bones has caused him reputational damage.

Indeed, Cosa Nostra, a prominent business lobby group in southern Italy, is believed to have instructed lawyers to initiate defamation proceedings against any person who insinuates a connection between Mashatile’s commercial activities and their own, for example by use of the phrase “Alex Mafia”. 

The national ANC operates on a two-term cycle, and serious contenders for office have been planning to contest the presidency in 2027. They do not welcome an early Mashatile takeover, especially because he would be a two-term president. 

Even politicians in the Gauteng camp, such as Fikile Mbalula and Panyaza Lesufi, are nowadays unlikely to rescue him if he flounders. They now have their own presidential ambitions for 2027, and rats do not habitually join a sinking ship. 

Who then is the most likely successor in the unlikely event that Ramaphosa stands down? President Samson Gwede Mantashe has a ring to it. While it is not true that Mantashe has held more positions than those in the Kama Sutra, as some critics have alarmingly imagined, he is a two-term ANC secretary-general and chair, as well as being a memorable minister.

His two masters degrees make him, by some estimations, twice as clever as the EFF’s Floyd Shivambu. Mantashe is also a scientific innovator, having made major contributions in the fields of both “hazenile” and “clean coal”.

With his famously low centre of gravity, both political and physical, he will never be a pushover. It is also to Mantashe’s advantage that he will be turning 69 in just a few weeks’ time. That makes him a plausible one-term president: a “safe pair of hands” who various factional contenders would be willing to tolerate as they prepare for the 2027 national conference. 

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

ANTHONY BUTLER: Zuma unravels all the good work done in KZN

Former president’s power has been cemented in part by continued courting of traditional leaders

First published in Business Day

08 MARCH 2024

Former president Jacob Zuma has done much to integrate the province of KwaZulu-Natal into national political life over the past three decades. Now he is threatening to undo his lifetime’s key achievement.

During the democratic transition, violent conflict between IFP- and ANC-aligned groups almost descended into civil war. After the ANC was unbanned Zuma was defeated by Cyril Ramaphosa for the position of secretary-general at the ANC’s Durban conference.

He was subsequently sent by then president Nelson Mandela to ameliorate ANC-IFP violence in his home province, at which he proved remarkable adept. Zuma then switched to national politics, rising to party chair in 1994 and then to deputy president in 1997. Two years later he was deputy president of the country under Thabo Mbeki.

Though Mbeki evidently believed he could dispense with Zuma at will, this proved to be a huge miscalculation. Zuma mobilised in KwaZulu-Natal, bringing hundreds of thousands of new members — many of them admittedly ghosts or zombies — to the provincial party, swelling delegate numbers and sweeping aside Mbeki at the 2007 Polokwane conference.

Zuma’s rise to the ANC presidency catalysed a huge increase in KwaZulu-Natal-based votes for the ANC in the elections that followed, and the province became an indispensable buttress to the liberation movement’s otherwise waning national electoral dominance.

On Zuma’s coattails a swathe of politicians and businesspeople from KwaZulu-Natal rose to prominent positions in the cabinet, the senior public service, parastatal boards and BEE consortia.

Despite driving this remarkable transformation of KwaZulu-Natal’s position in national political life, Zuma has since destroyed all that he had accomplished.

His power had been cemented in part by his continued courting of traditional leaders in his province, with various bogus land rights acts cobbled together to secure their allegiance. These later proved costly.

Moreover, by allowing explicit ethnic mobilisation by his supporters in times of crisis, he also presided over a resurgence of ethnic tension, something the ANC had strived for decades to minimise. Such ethnic mobilisation played a major role in triggering the appalling xenophobic violence that has since plagued much of the country.

After his humiliating eviction from office in 2018 under threat of being ousted by his own party, Zuma agitated against what he saw as his politically motivated harassment by prosecutorial authorities. Despite the extremely slow pace of investigation — something critics have seen as deliberate — Zuma forced the hand of the authorities by acting in contempt of the Zondo commission of inquiry.

His needless jailing created fertile ground for criminal mafias and political sympathisers to incite a riot-cum-shopping spree in July 2021 that inflicted more than 300 deaths and tens of billions of rand in damages.

The entrenchment of traditional leaders’ power in trust lands close to the economic hub of Durban resulted in poorly managed informal settlements, flagrant breaches of environmental regulations, degrading water quality and polluted rivers, estuaries and beaches.

In conjunction with climate change-induced weather patterns that have brought coastal storms and inland flooding that has killed hundreds, the beautiful province is being turned into a multifaceted environmental catastrophe.

Now Zuma has launched the uMkhonto weSizwe party. Borrowing the name of the military wing of the ANC and the SA Communist Party is surely a deliberate act designed to elicit a response from the electoral commission.

Zuma’s associates say they will respond to this by initiating a repeat of the violent unrest of 2021. KwaZulu-Natal’s once beloved son is rapidly becoming the province’s worst enemy.

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

ANTHONY BUTLER: When politicians have to shackle themselves to a rotting corpse

First published in BDLive

09 FEBRUARY 2024 – 05:00

In this historic year in global politics, 64 countries accounting for almost half of the world’s population are scheduled to hold national elections.

Of course, most of these elections will be rigged. We should not concern ourselves unduly about the swing vote for the Supreme People’s Assembly in the Democratic People’s Republic of (North) Korea or the presidential elections of the Russian Federation.

At the freer and fairer end of the electoral spectrum it is the old colonial power, the UK, that offers many surprising parallels for SA. Electors are fed up with an exhausted Conservative Party government that is beset by scandal and plagued by corruption. Citizens bewail failing public services, a “cost of living” crisis, a sclerotic economy, and sewage that runs into the rivers.

But in this disunited kingdom the official opposition Labour party lacks the leadership and popular support it needs to secure a majority later in the year. All of this means a coalition government is quite likely before the end of 2024. Like South Africans though, Britons don’t really know how to do it.

After the 2010 elections Labour won a minority of seats but the Conservatives were also unable to form a government on their own. The Liberal Democrats or “Lib Dems”, who held the balance of power, were policy soul mates of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s Labour, and most party members and activists were strongly opposed to a coalition deal with the Conservatives. Nevertheless, the party leaders opted for just that.

In the end, the personalities of the party leaders, and the trust between them, were key factors in this decision. The incumbent Labour negotiators, in the words of one prominent Lib Dem fixer, were “arrogant, exhausted, and divided”. He noted that they were simply unwilling to compromise with a smaller party, and governing with them would be like being “shackled to a rotting corpse”.

Earlier this week in SA, social development minister Lindiwe Zulu threw a tentative stone into the political firepool to see if it would make a splash. In Moscow, in the exile days, she had studied journalism and she remains a communications professional. It was therefore of great interest when she appeared on the SABC’s early morning Sunrise programme on Tuesday morning to reflect on coalition politics.

The idea she ran up the flagpole was that the media has been “slanting towards” coalition government. Debate about coalitions is not a logical consequence of the possible decline of ANC to minority status, but rather the malign project of news media determined to “get rid of the ANC”.

Zulu’s tentative thoughts about the intrinsic undesirability of coalition suggest there is a real concern in the ANC that the party’s election prospects are poor. Nonetheless, there is real resistance to formal coalition deals.

This may be because the divergent preferences of different provinces make coalition deals all but impossible. After all, the Gauteng ANC has been making loving eyes at the EFF for years — but other ANC provinces detest it. The IFP might be a convenient partner at national level, but that would surely complicate deals in KwaZulu-Natal.

Moreover, formal coalitions are sure to involve some transparent policy pledges to which the partners would have to commit. Worst of all, coalitions mean politicians who have spent decades ensconced in the comfortable hierarchies of the liberation movement actually have to negotiate with other people and build trust.

As in Britain in 2010, coalition politics isn’t just about arithmetic and policy congruence. It also succeeds as the result of trust between individuals and groups, good or bad fortune and the personalities of senior leaders. Who will be willing to shackle themselves to our own rotting corpse later in the year?

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

ANTHONY BUTLER: Two big factors being underestimated in projections of ANC vote

Water and sanitation services, as well as the MK Party, are issues seeping into the foreground

First published in Business Day

12 JANUARY 2024

A broad consensus has emerged among political analysts and risk consultants that the ANC will secure somewhere between 43% and 49% of the vote in the upcoming national and provincial elections.

Such a scenario suggests easy coalition negotiations for Cyril Ramaphosa. The ANC and SA president will simply need to rope in the IFP, or a group of smaller players, to secure a working majority in the National Assembly.

Analysts therefore envision no need for the ANC to strike a national deal with the EFF or DA. In consequence, there will be no significant shift in government’s overall policy direction.

It is sensible to question the reliability of such prognoses. After all, as sceptics have observed in the past, political analysts tend to agree with one another fully only when they are all wrong.

I believe the importance of two factors is now being underestimated. First, the challenge of water and sanitation services has crept onto the radar of alert political scientists. The 2022 Afrobarometer opinion surveys asked respondents to name the three most important problems facing the country.

A full 30% of those older than 55 chose “water supply” — pretty much on a par with electricity (32%) and in the same ballpark as unemployment (42%). One in five younger respondents, aged 18-55, also flagged water as a priority.

We can be confident that the salience of water has risen steeply since then, as the collapse of infrastructure and maintenance accelerated. Unlike the Eskom problem, where the ANC boldly attributed electricity shortages to anti-coal environmentalism and increased energy for the poor, the governing party has no remotely believable tale to spin.

Living without water and relying on tanker deliveries run by politically aligned mafias is galling. Collapsing sewerage systems are an affront to human dignity in a way that load-shedding is not.

The second key threat to the ANC is its own declining internal coherence, revealed starkly by the rise of the uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) Party, promoted energetically in recent weeks by former president Jacob Zuma.

As ANC chair Gwede Mantashe has hilariously observed, Zuma can be likened to other greedy and power-lusting “militia dictators” on the African continent who promoted rebel movements to regain influence. One thinks of Angola’s Jonas Savimbi with his Unita fighters; Central African Republic president François Bozizé Yangouvonda and his rebel insurgents; or perhaps former SA president Thabo Mbeki and his revolutionary Congress of the People (COPE) armchair militia.

The trouble with the MK Party is that it is not a conventional opposition party at all. It is rather an ANC faction, regionally and ethnically concentrated in KwaZulu-Natal, whose ideological positions map directly onto those of the mother body itself. It cannot be undermined by claims that it will withdraw social grants from the poor or return SA to the dark days of apartheid.

Indeed, Zuma has insisted that MK is true to the ANC ambitions and values that Cyril Ramaphosa’s deviant ANC neglects cruelly. The votes the party gains will almost all come directly from a liberation movement that is desperately short of voters.

The conundrum posed by the MK Party pushed ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula, hitherto a master of “constructive ambiguity” (you can’t understand what he is talking about), to complain last weekend that “we defended former president Zuma, even going to parliament and saying that a swimming pool is a fire pool… The Constitutional Court, chaired by Mogoeng Mogoeng, issued a judgment against Jacob Zuma, but the ANC stood by him”.

By revealing something we already knew, the man in charge at Luthuli House has, paradoxically, somehow managed to tell his own party’s supporters that they are all idiots.

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