President Ramaphosa takes us back to greater secrecy, less accountability in private political funding

Politics is an expensive business. There’s no doubt that running nationwide electoral campaigns and operating a successful political party requires millions of rands. Although parties that are represented in parliament and provincial legislatures receive funding from the state – roughly R2.2-billion in the 2023/2024 financial year – raising funds from donors provides them with an additional source of income from which to cover their expenses. Yet politics and money are also a very dangerous mix. In democracies across the world, parties are susceptible to influence wielded by powerful private interests through donations. As our own recent history of state capture has shown, private donations can be used to facilitate corruption and the pillaging of state resources. Fortunately, since April 2021, South Africans have had deeper insight into the funding sources of our political parties thanks to the Political Funding Act (PFA) (previously the ‘Political Party Funding Act’). But a recent proclamation signed by President Cyril Ramaphosa is about to greatly weaken the efficacy of this crucial piece of legislation.

According to the IEC, there are 27,627,264 registered voters currently.

A background to the PFA and its two key limits

The PFA requires all registered parties to disclose to the Electoral Commission (IEC) all donations that they receive from private sources (citizens, companies, trusts and so on) above a certain amount. Until 18 August 2025, this amount – referred to as the disclosure threshold – had been R100,000. It also places a limit on the total amount that parties are permitted to receive from a single private donor in a financial year. Prior to 18 August 2025, this amount was R15-million.

Although the disclosure threshold and upper donations limit were relatively high when compared to similar thresholds set in other middle-income countries (such as Mexico and Poland, which have much stricter limits), they nevertheless provided voters with valuable insight into who funds our biggest parties. This has allowed voters to exercise the right to vote from a more informed position, and has given citizens the opportunity to hold politicians to account over their funding sources. However, one central weakness in the PFA is that it gives the president the power to determine what these two crucial limits should be. On 18 August 2025, the president demonstrated just how problematic this legislative weakness is, by issuing a proclamation to double both limits – a move that will introduce greater secrecy into the funding of our politics. But first, let’s take a step back and trace how we arrived at this point.

What is the origin of the proclamation to double the limits?

In terms of the PFA, the president, “acting on a resolution of the National Assembly (NA), may by proclamation in the Gazette make regulations” to determine the disclosure threshold and upper limit. In practice, this means that parliament passes a resolution recommending what the new limits should be, which the president then considers before deciding to set the limits by way of a proclamation.

Last year, following a series of legislative missteps by parliament and the president, a gap was created in the PFA that meant that the disclosure threshold and upper limit were no longer in force. My Vote Counts (MVC) successfully launched urgent proceedings in the Western Cape High Court to close this gap and have the limits temporarily reinstated until the president determined new ones. As a result of this process, the Portfolio Committee on Home Affairs (the committee), which is responsible for any changes to the PFA, began deliberating on what the new limits should be, so that it could prepare a draft resolution for parliament to consider for recommendation to the president.

As part of this process, the committee asked the pParliamentary Budget Office (PBO) to explain the rationale for the original determination of a R100,000 threshold and a R15-million upper limit. The PBO found that there was no evidence that either limit was ‘determined with regard to any studies, data or analysis as to the appropriateness of that limit’.  It provided a detailed report and a summary of its recommendations for the committee to consider, which included a number of carefully researched proposals on how the new limits should be calculated. However, on 1 April 2025, the committee chose to ignore the PBO’s proposals, instead adopting an arbitrary proposal by an ANC MP to simply double both limits. Not a single member objected to the proposal, even though the committee was entirely unable to justify its reasoning for recommending that the limits be doubled. This proposal was then sent to the NA as a draft resolution.

Parliament and the president favour more secrecy for donors and parties, and less information for voters

On 20 May 2025, the NA considered the vommittee’s draft resolution. Apart from MKP, ATM, Al Jamah-ah, and BOSA, all parties voted to adopt a resolution recommending that the disclosure threshold be doubled to R200,000, and the upper limit be doubled to R30-million. As required by law, the NA resolution was then sent to the president for final consideration. President Ramaphosa ultimately chose to reduce transparency and increase secrecy in political funding, by determining that the limits should be doubled.

President Cyril Ramaphosa inside the Blue Train in Cape Town

We do not know how the president came to this decision, or what factors he took into account when assessing parliament’s recommendation, but it appears that the new limits are not based on context-specific evidence and research. There needs to be a balance between ensuring that parties are adequately funded, and that such funding is regulated and mitigates the risk of undue influence from donors. The new limits do not strike such a balance. Rather, they greatly favour parties, which can now receive more money from donors with less scrutiny, and disadvantages voters, by diminishing our ability to exercise our constitutional right to an informed vote and our right of access to information.

What it means for political funding and the health of our democracy

Going forward, the details of all donations under R200,000 will not be known to the public. This is an enormous sum for most South Africans, and donations of such amounts should be made public knowledge to facilitate scrutiny of parties’ relationships with donors and ensure that donors are not receiving anything in return. The last four years of disclosure data show that a handful of wealthy individuals dominate our private political funding landscape. Doubling the amount a donor can donate to a party in a year to R30-million will give donors an even greater ability to have an outsized influence on our parties and their policy positions. It will also make parties more susceptible to undue influence. And, because the law does not regulate donations from related parties through the different legal entities they control, wealthy donors can now have an even more significant impact.

This move will serve to strengthen the influence that wealthy donors have over parties, and weaken the influence that ordinary citizens, should, by right, be able to exercise over their elected representatives in a democracy. Ultimately, it is the health of our democracy that will suffer as this crucial spotlight that shines a light on private political funding is dimmed. MVC will continue to advocate and litigate when necessary for a political funding regime that deepens transparency and accountability.

Lauren Gildenhuys is a research intern and Joel Bregman is a senior researcher with My Vote Counts NPC