SHIRLEY DE VILLIERS: By hook or by crook

The ANC must surely be in danger of becoming a pay-as-you-go party. That’s what happens when you don’t settle your bills.

A City Press report at the weekend detailed how the ANC is apparently scrounging for cents like a student in a bar to get its election campaign off the ground. That’s seemingly on top of a failure to pay staffers on time. And, embarrassingly, it’s still sitting on unpaid bills from its January 8 birthday celebrations in Polokwane.

Clearly raffling off Cyril Ramaphosa wasn’t nearly as lucrative as expected.

And apparently it should be of no concern to taxpayers that the party with its grubby hands on the national kitty is incapable of managing its own finances.

At least, that’s what ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula would have us believe. Speaking to City Press about the party’s apparent inability to scrape together funds, Mbalula said: “Why is it a story that the ANC doesn’t have money for campaigns? It isn’t a story.” Nothing to see here, then.

No-one can ever accuse the ANC’s animate loud hailer of being short of words — even if those have all the gravitas of Jacob Zuma on a moral regeneration drive. But what’s interesting is what Mbalula didn’t say. At no point did he announce that the party isn’t in financial difficulty. He simply deflected: the story is of no interest; all parties are struggling with election funds; those saying the ANC has no money are “stupid because you can’t wish anything bad on your own organisation”. All laced with the logical inconsistencies we’ve come to expect from flip-flop Fiks.

It’s not a new position the party finds itself in either. It struggled to stump up for its own payroll in December 2019, June 2020, August 2020, May 2021, July 2022 and September 2022; just last year its workers protested because they didn’t get their promised salary increase. And now, apparently, staff are being paid late — and UIF and medical aid contributions haven’t been paid for three months, a source told City Press.

Then there’s the small matter of Ezulwini Investments. The party rang up a R102m bill for posters and banners that Ezulwini provided in the 2019 election cycle, and failed to pay. It eventually settled that matter out of court in December.

Which prompted ActionSA’s Michael Beaumont to ask how it is that a cash-strapped party that declared just R10m in donations in the quarter to end-December could foot a bill of that magnitude, City Press reports. You’d need a pretty large couch for that ...

In any event, that’s reportedly now the subject of an investigation by the electoral commission.

Tinkering with the law

It’s no surprise, then, that the ANC is trying to find other ways of making ends meet — including fiddling with legislation it clearly regrets enacting.

Just this past week, the National Assembly passed the Electoral Matters Amendment Bill, which will bring the Political Party Funding Act (PPFA) up to speed with the inclusion of independent candidates in the country’s elections.

As part of that bill, the ANC quickly tacked on an additional, and unrelated, amendment: that cash for parties from the Represented Political Parties Fund no longer be split with two-thirds distributed on the basis of proportional representation in the legislature and one-third as equitable share. No, the ANC smuggled in an amendment that would see money distributed on a 90:10 split, with 90% as the proportional representation share. Benefiting the large parties at the expense of the smaller ones, in other words, and undermining the entire point of the legislation: to level the electoral playing field.

It’s wealth by stealth: the ANC, as the dominant party in parliament, is set to score an additional R50m-odd.

And home affairs minister Aaron Motsoaledi’s explanation for changing the formula makes about as much sense as Fikile’s ramblings: the inclusion of independents means the formula for determining funding distribution had to be changed. Therefore the ANC deserves a larger slice of the pie.

A second issue relates to changes to donation and disclosure thresholds. The regulations cap donations to parties at R15m, and put the disclosure requirement at anything above R100,000. But the ANC hasn’t been particularly enamoured with its own limits, finding they’ve had a chilling effect on its fundraising abilities. It’s long been keen to change these.

It did initially try to sneak in an amendment that would give the president carte blanche to change the thresholds. After public backlash, it has settled for the status quo, giving the power back to parliament — where the ANC in any case enjoys an easy majority.

But there’s a bigger issue here: public interest organisation My Vote Counts points out that the amendment act will repeal the regulations limiting funding. Which means if Ramaphosa doesn’t make a simultaneous proclamation of funding limits when he signs the act into law, “there will be no disclosure threshold or upper limit in place, completely undermining key objectives of the PPFA”.

All of which looks very suspicious when there’s an election just months away — and a party staring into a financial abyss.