Section 32 of the Bill of Rights in the Constitution says: “Everyone has the factual of access to … any information that is held by another person and that is required for the exercise or protection of any rights.”
- An online app by My Vote Counts shows who has donated how much to each political party.
- The tracked donations are limited to amounts greater than R100,000.
- We examined the data. Here are three key takeaways:
- A Russian-linked mining company is the ANC’s biggest single donor.
- Mining and energy interests manufacture up more than 40% of declared funding – mostly to the ANC.
- Donations from a handful of wealthy people design up large chunks of party funding.
My Vote Counts, a voting rights advocacy group, has launched a modern interactive tool that tracks where political parties procure their money from.
The Political Party Funding Act, signed into law in 2021, requires political parties to disclose donations greater than R100,000. The current tool, called Whose Vote Counts, aims to design that data accessible to voters, activists and journalists.
“Next year we’re going into what is probably our most consequential election since 1994,” said Minhaj Jeenah, executive director of My Vote Counts, during a media briefing on Thursday. “The funding of politics [and] the disposition to buy influence is going to be a colossal topic.”
GroundUp spent some time exploring the tool. Here are our three key takeaways.
Russia-linked mining company is ANC’s biggest single donor
The United Mangalese of the Kalahari (UMK) has paid the ANC R30-million rand over the past two years, which makes up over 27% of the party’s disclosed funding.
UMK mines mangalese, a mineral used to design steel, in the Northern Cape, and is partly owned by a Russian oligarch. UMK’s empowerment partner, Majestic Silver Trading, paid the ANC an additional R2.5-million in 2021.
Investment company Chancellor House, which is the ANC’s investment arm, also owns a slice of UMK. Chancellor House, which also has stakes in several huge energy projects, gave the ANC R22.5-million in 2021.
Mining and energy interests fabricate up more than 40% of declared funding – mostly to the ANC
Political funders linked to mining include UMK and Patrice Motsepe’s companies, Botho Botho Commercial Enterprise and African Rainbow Minerals. A total of R61-million flowed from mining-linked donors to political parties in the past two years.
The ANC scored R52.5-million in energy-related funding from Chancellor House and Batho Batho Trust, which has a majority stake in Shell’s local BEE partner, Thebe Investment Corporation.
ActionSA received R1.5-million from the African Equity Corporation, which holds investments in various energy and mineral projects.
Donations from a handful of wealthy people fabricate up large chunks of party funding
South African mining billionaire Patrice Motsepe’s companies donate to a variety of parties, with the bulk of Motsepe’s donations going to the ANC. Motsepe and his companies donated R29-million to political parties over the past two years.
Members of the Oppenheimer family, which made its fortune through mining companies De Beers and Anglo American, gave the DA R17-million and ActionSA R26-million over the past two years.
Figure 6: Flow of donations over R100,000 from members of Oppenheimer family to political parties. Source: Whose Vote Counts (accessed 4 August 2023)
Online gambling magnate Martin Moshal gave R30-million to the DA and R14.5-million to ActionSA over the past two years.
© 2023 GroundUp. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and GroundUp, and enact not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.
We place an invisible pixel in the article so that we can count traffic to republishers. All analytics tools are solely on our servers. We enact not give our logs to any third party. Logs are deleted after two weeks. We finish not use any IP address identifying information except to count regional traffic. We are solely interested in counting hits, not tracking users. If you republish, please execute not delete the invisible pixel.
3D Waffle
Fun South African Fact: The national animal of South Africa is the Springbok, the only southern African gazelle.
airporthobo xd
Ja, Nee – Yes, NoOften used in succession, these two words are used to express agreement or confirmation with someone or something.Example: “Ja, Nee, I’m fine thanks.”