Soon we may know who gives our fat cat politicians their milk

Election posters cost a lot of money. I know this because I was once involved with trying to source the things, and five years ago it cost nearly R25 per printed poster on some corrugated cardboard.

That may not sound like much, but when you’re doing 100 000, it’s easy to see how fast these little expenses can start running into the millions. Even if you’re printing and importing your T-shirts on the cheap from China, politics is a rich man’s game.

In 2016, Nomvula Mokonyane blabbed that the ANC’s municipal elections campaign had cost “more than a billion”. The ANC tried to distance itself from that statement, but she was the head of elections at the time and must have had a pretty good idea of what that yellow Everest of Zuma faces cost them.

A billion rand. Even if it “only” cost half that, that’s still a lot of packets of Simba chips.

Then there’s the cost of running a political party between the big election cycles. The ANC spent upwards of R25 million just on hotel costs for delegates at its December elective conference at Nasrec.

But where does all this money come from? And what does someone who’d fund a political party want in return?

This is a pressing question in our country, which inherited a culture of secrecy about political funding from the apartheid era. Of all the things we decided to pack in our trunk and carry with us from the time of the National Party, the right to maintain confidentiality for political donations must rank as among the most egregious.

It puts the needs of political parties first and the rights of the voter and the taxpayer in a very distant third. In second place is the donor and whatever agenda he or she may have in giving money to a political party.

Jacob Zuma was at least being ultra honest when he declared in a speech some time back that it would be good for a business person to “invest” in the ANC. He told a gala dinner in 2015: “I always say to business people, if you support the ANC, you are investing very wisely. If you don’t invest in the ANC, your business is in danger.” He advised business owners that when the ANC’s treasurer-general “knocks at your door, open your door widely … take out your chequebook … [and] write six figures.”

Six figures, eh? Seven figures are often way more likely.

So people who donate large sums of money to the ANC will be expecting to receive far larger amounts in return, primarily through tenders. When we read about dodgy businessmen and women winning the rights to lucrative projects worth millions and billions, the assumption is often that they must have bribed some official. But once we have access to party funding records, it will be far easier to track the links back to those who “invested” in whichever party is in power and then got their rewards.

I can only imagine how much money the Guptas donated to the ANC over the years. No doubt that would have contributed to them thinking an ANC-led government has little more than a stump to stand on now that it is crowing about “state capture”. The Guptas are probably just a particularly prominent group of such donors among hundreds who’ve done much the same thing over the years, to a lesser or greater extent, each with their own expectations of what they want in return. White monopoly capital perfected this game long before any Gupta brother came slithering into life in Saharanpur.

So as much as business people do “capture” the ruling party, the ruling party captures them too. You can probably go so far as to look at it as a sort of symbiotic relationship of mutual parasitism, with both sides feeding on their bleating host, the taxpaying public.

Once we will be allowed to poke into who funds our politics, these webs will become easier to unravel and we’ll be able to understand who has bought whom and why.

And that’s a good thing. But there’s always a price to pay.

As much as it would be great to know who funds the ANC (especially, for example, if they are taking multibillion-dollar donations from Russia, China or the US), there’s the threat to democracy and opposition parties to consider. If it emerges, for example, that the owner of a company that received a big tender from an ANC-controlled administration then donated millions to the DA, the EFF, the UDM (or any other opposition party), that person may risk being punished for it by whoever is in power.

That road builder, cleaning company or auditing firm may suddenly lose their source of income. All this openness may paradoxically feed into a national culture of repression.

I don’t have the answer for this, except to say that, ultimately, secrecy may be worse.

Just because a party is in opposition and doesn’t necessarily have its hands on the levers of power doesn’t mean they should be given special treatment. Some of these parties, such as the DA, are running governments on a smaller scale, but with great access to the state budget – and there’s every chance the EFF and Julius Malema will find themselves in government one way or the other, and maybe sooner than we think.

So if the EFF has been accepting money from the likes of Adriano Mazzotti – as that shady purveyor of cigarettes has himself told us – then that allows us to draw our own conclusions about both Mazzotti and the EFF’s president.

Public disclosure hasn’t solved the issue of corruption in the USA, admittedly, where we can see exactly how much money the likes of the gun lobby has given Donald Trump and the Republicans. But at least when Donald Trump says we should arm school teachers, we know he’s saying that simply to please his donors, not because he gives a hoot about the issue or even because he’s capable of doing his own thinking.

So here we are. What’s the conclusion? It may all ultimately be pointless anyway, because having written all the above, I don’t for one moment really believe that even if the law says this information should be recorded and made public, political parties will play by the rules. Especially if they are abusing state power.

They’ll just find another way to obscure the truth. But at least it will be that little bit harder for them to feed in the dark – and that will be progress.

Citizen digital editor Charles Cilliers