What are Mashaba and Malema hiding?

AmaBhungane is fighting to access the financial reports of all <a href="https://absafricatv.com/south-africa-v-wales-two-memorable-moments-worlds-apart/" title="South Africa v Wales: Two memorable moments; worlds apart”>South Africa’s political parties. Only ActionSA and the EFF have gone on the offensive to avoid full transparency.

EFF leader Julius Malema (left) and ActionSA leader Herman Mashaba (right). Their parties have appealed the IEC’s decision to release political party financial reports to amaBhungane. (X / IEC / Canva)

Who is paying for our fragile democracy?

And what are political parties actually doing with the money we see coming in through the immensely imperfect disclosure system (which most parties want to dilute further)?

AmaBhungane has been fighting for the better part of a year to take political funding transparency much, much further than the current legislative regime demands.

In October last year we made a sweeping request to the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) in terms of the Promotion of Access to Information Act (PAIA).

The ask: the financial statements of all political parties with seats in parliament.

The IEC is the only public body that would have all of these at hand and, as it turns out, it seems admirably keen on transparency.

But the journey has been rocky and at this point just two parties stand between us and what we believe could be an unprecedented level of political transparency.

They are ActionSA and the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF).

Both have lodged objections with the Information Regulator to appeal the IEC’s decision to give us what we asked for.

This decision was not easily won. The IEC was first obliged to notify the parties that we were asking for their financials. The PAIA process then allowed the parties to make representations about what they think should or should not be revealed, although these are not binding on the IEC.

Just to be sure, the IEC procured not one, but two legal opinions before agreeing to give us the records – subject to limited redactions of individuals’ personal details in terms of the Protection of Personal Information Act (Popia). Not perfect but still pretty good and it is noteworthy that when all was said and done only two parties dug in their heels.

So what makes ActionSA and the EFF different?

We have no idea and that is kind of the point.

We approached both parties to ask why they have stonewalled where their peers have conceded.

The Economically Furtive Fighters

The EFF just ignored us.

Perhaps that’s not surprising for a party whose leader, Julius Malema, has publicly called on supporters to make donations just below the R100 000 threshold currently requiring public disclosure.

It also bears mentioning that amaBhungane is one of the media organisations banned from EFF press conferences following our extensive reporting on links between EFF funding and allegedly dodgy public sector contracts.

Evidence emerging from the Madlanga Commission (the judicial commission of inquiry into alleged criminality, political interference and corruption in the criminal justice system) also points towards there possibly being more than a few dark secrets in the EFF books, apart from its well-documented financial relationship with tobacco bosses Adriano Mazzotti and Mohammed Sayed as well as potentially, it turns out, crime intelligence official Feroz Khan.

As with almost all the other parties, our PAIA might shed some light on the EFF’s inner workings, but we can only speculate in the absence of the kind of transparency we are pursuing.

ActionSA has at least defended its stance – and quite aggressively so.

Its national chairperson Michael Beaumont responded to questions saying that the party “like any other organization, is entitled to dispute the granting of a PAIA application in relation to information the organization deems to fall outside the scope of [PAIA]”.

True enough, but a little thin on the all-important “why”.

He continues that “to infer that such a dispute is tantamount to being opposed to transparency is cynical in the extreme and more evidence of why ActionSA is distrusting of amaBhungane and its motives”.

We apparently have a “history of unduly targeting ActionSA”. Another strange assertion given that we have in our entire history published only five articles mentioning the party – three of which deal with online gambling and mention in passing that ActionSA and the Democratic Alliance (DA) have been major recipients of donations from gambling mogul Martin Moshal.

It is also unclear how a blanket request for all parties’ information would constitute a specifically anti-ActionSA agenda, but so it goes.

ActionSA takes exception to the insinuation that it might be relatively opposed to transparency, at least compared to its peers who have decided not to pick up the cudgels.

Instead, it claims to have “led the fight for enforcement of the Political Party Funding Act”.

This is a little disingenuous.

Back in 2023 when the civil society organisation My Vote Counts challenged the Act on the basis of, among other things, it setting too high a bar for mandatory funding disclosure, ActionSA fought back with the argument that declaring donations below R100 000 would dissuade funding of small emerging parties.

If that sounds familiar, refer back to the EFF stance mentioned above.

And as is also consistently the case with internet trolls attacking our reporting, Beaumont claimed that the real enemy of transparency here is amaBhungane.

He says that our request “begs the question of who funds amaBhungane, a matter that I note amaBhungane does not publicise despite the unusual nature of a media outlet being privately funded”.

He may have us confused with someone else.

As has repeatedly been the case, we hope he and others would simply Google us. They might find that we exhaustively declare not only the identity of our donors but also how much they donate.

The link to the declarations on our website is here.

Our full (and unredacted) financial statements are here if anyone is interested.

ActionSA further accuses us of partisanship (despite us making the exact same request of literally all parties) with reference to an alleged conflict of interest involving a journalist who worked here some years ago.

Said journalist wrote a number of critical reports of ActionSA leader Herman Mashaba’s mayoral administration in Johannesburg in relation to dodgy tenders back when Mashaba belonged to the DA and ActionSA did not exist.

At the same time that journalist had a sibling who was Helen Zille’s former spokesman, says Beaumont.

In the spirit of transparency we are asking of political parties, that’s completely true, but again we’re not sure how writing about the administration of a DA mayor before ActionSA existed represents a vendetta against the party.

In any case, at the time Zille publicly defended Mashaba.

Maybe ActionSA and EFF should be asking themselves who exactly is making who look bad here. DM

This story was produced by theamaBhungane Centre for Investigative Journalism. Sign up for their newsletter.

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