Business Day (Johannesburg)
Anthony Butler
13 July 2009
opinion
Johannesburg — IT HAS been another exciting seven days at the heart of politics, where money and power intersect. Corruption in provincial tendering has roused Parliament from its slumbers.
African National Congress (ANC) Youth League president Julius Malema has meanwhile fronted a campaign for the political allocation of mining licences. The most significant money stories of the week, however, have concerned the decreasing viability of the big opposition parties.
First there was the saga at the Congress of the People (COPE). The business elite associated with former president Thabo Mbeki has provided both funding and a sense of purpose to this pseudo-party. Its snout has always pointed directly towards the money, no matter how hard ostensible leader Mosiuoa Lekota and his Grindrodian cheerleaders may have tried to turn the creature around to face electors.
COPE failed comprehensively to achieve its objectives in this year's elections. Even the financiers' imposition of Mvume Dandala as presidential candidate did not propel the party to government in Eastern Cape or to the balance of power in Western Cape. This left it with no real leverage over the new ANC leadership and little patronage to dispense beyond the allocation of seats in Parliament and the provincial legislatures. COPE's business backers, and tragically estranged political families in Eastern Cape, are now desperate to rejoin the ANC, and so to re-establish their umbilical connection to the empowerment state.
The second endangered organisation is the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP). In yet another reworking of the ANC's official version of history , citizens are being encouraged to re- imagine the IFP as a heroic pioneer of the anti- apartheid struggle.
Such strenuous fantasising, and the implausible elevation of IFP leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi to the pantheon of struggle heroes, cannot overcome the obstacles to immediate absorption of the Zulu nationalist movement. Relations have been poisoned by decades of conflict, and today's IFP leaders share little in common with their provincial ANC counterparts. The newly created traditional affairs department, however, can use new state patronage mechanisms -- backed by public resources -- to slowly detach Inkatha's traditionalist power base from the party. So long as the ANC pays apparent homage to Zulu royalty, traditional leaders, and to Buthelezi himself, it can now open or close the taps of patronage to modulate the speed at which the IFP's electoral base crumbles.
Finally, there is the Democratic Alliance (DA), the most seemingly robust of the opposition parties. It has a comprehensive programme, communicates well with its constituency, and enjoys an upward trajectory of electoral support. But the DA cannot build alliances with parties mesmerised by ANC money. The official opposition, moreover, depends upon vulnerable funding practices to sustain its campaigns and organisational machinery.
The ANC's 2005 discussion document on the organisational review proposed a "comprehensive system" of public party funding. In a little-noticed codicil, it also envisaged an "effective regulatory architecture for private funding of political parties and civil society groups to enhance accountability and transparency to the citizenry".
The conventional wisdom has been that the ANC and DA alike will continue to resist party funding legislation because both depend on secret contributions. Smug DA activists have assumed their money is cleaner. Rumours concerning ANC-sponsored party funding legislation have nevertheless recently resurfaced.
The ANC has certainly generated controversial income from front companies and foreign donors. In recent years, however, it has also established open (and shameless) funding mechanisms. It milks parastatals, empties corporate leaders' wallets (supposedly in exchange for cocktails with ministers, and dull business magazines), and extracts donations from party members who have coincidentally benefit ed from state tender s. The DA's corporate donors, meanwhile, fear exposure and government retribution more than ever before.
Selectively targeted laws and institutions to promote "transparency" and "accountability" in party funding could therefore today cripple the DA's finances while leaving the ANC's relatively unscathed.
An effective opposition sustains confidence in the political system and helps to regulate the conduct of government. The collapse of minority parties is not in the interests of the ANC or of the country. There is a danger, however, that all three major opposition parties will soon fall upon very hard times.
Butler teaches politics at Wits University.
Be the first to Write a Comment!
Copyright © 2009 Business Day. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com).
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica.
