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ActionSA welcomes the Western Cape High Court’s dismissal of the application brought by My Vote Counts (MVC), in which ActionSA’s legal team successfully argued against a short-sighted attempt to protect the political status quo, where established parties do as they please and evade true transparency and accountability, while seeking to impose unreasonable regulations that would throttle newer political parties.

MVC approached the court to have parts of the Party Funding Act declared unconstitutional, specifically the provisions that impose a R100 000 threshold for the disclosure of donations and the R15 million annual limit. Their arguments sought to reduce the annual limit from a single donor and to require that every donation be disclosed, irrespective of its size.

ActionSA is proud that our legal team successfully argued against this misguided application, with the court’s judgment correctly finding no merit in parts of MVC’s arguments and noting that moot issues had been brought before the court.

ActionSA has made it clear that our opposition is not to transparency in party funding. On the contrary, we have led the charge by consistently declaring our funding, achieving consecutive clean audits and exposing numerous instances of egregious non-compliance by other parties with the IEC.

Regrettably, the now-dismissed MVC application was silent on this widespread non-compliance and instead sought to restrict the work of newer political parties and anyone with a practical understanding of South Africa’s political democracy would recognise that such an application does nothing to advance our democratic project.

ActionSA remains firm that the implications of the application served less to strengthen South Africa’s democratic project and more to hinder it through poorly conceived arguments, which ActionSA has previously articulated in full. ActionSA remains committed to strengthening greater transparency and accountability in party funding, but it must be approached with sobriety and grounded in an understanding of the real issues and other important elements of our constitutional democracy.

Issued by ActionSA National Chairperson Michael Beaumont