It’s not even a year since a law was put in place compelling political parties to tell voters who their biggest funders are, and already these disclosures have revealed a lot about the money SA’s democracy runs on.

As a result of the Political Party Funding Act, it has emerged that the super-wealthy Oppenheimer family has been among the biggest funders of the DA, for example, while the ANC has been getting big bucks from, among others, a manganese mining company owned by Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg...