Civil society organisations are getting restless as an unholy alliance of the ANC, DA and EFF stonewalls the implementation of the Party Political Funding Act, keeping the electorate in the dark about their funders and the door wide open for future corruption of the political process.

This year most roads at the Zondo commission have led back to a metastatic cancer in our political system: using the awarding of tenders and government contracts as a way of getting kickbacks that will go towards funding the dominant political party (usually but not exclusively the ANC), be it at national, provincial or local level.

In the process of using tenders for party fundraising and patronage, it's also evident that many of the politicians who seek to feed the party also sought to feed themselves.

Although we will still have to wait many months to read Deputy Chief Justice Zondo's findings and recommendations on this, we already have an instrument to prevent state capture now and in future: it's called the Political Party Funding Act (PPFA) 6 of 2018, which was passed by Parliament in 2018 and assented to by the president on 23 January 2019.

Signing the Act was one of Cyril...