Once again, if one really insists on seeing the silver lining around every dark cloud, one could argue that at least the captors applied a rigorous, real-life stress test to our Constitution and laws, relentlessly jamming their blood funnel[1] into every little crack that our Constitution and laws left open. So at least we now know where the problems are.
Martin Gilens, professor of Politics at Princeton University and author of Affluence & Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America (2012, Princeton University Press). Credit: Penn State.
In Part 2.3 I’ve touched on a US study[2] showing that the political preferences of the bottom 90% of income earners have “essentially no impact”.
The cause is the same as for our democracy: moneyed elites are allowed to fund political parties and/or candidates, the building blocks of democracy. How can one expect any other result? Obviously moneyed elites would favour candidates and issues that favour them right back, duh. As you will remember, this – political finance reform – was one of the core issues on which Bernie Sanders, presidential candidate in last year’s US Democratic primaries, ran.[3]
This problem is at the root of our state capture. That is what has opened the doors for the corrupt money to enter our system. It is also one of the main reasons why it is so difficult to get rid of President Zuma – at least all senior ANC leaders know that a part of the money that comes as a reward for subverting our democracy finds its way to the ANC. It makes them to a certain degree complicit. And without that money, the organisation would be in dire straits.
The ANC is not alone in this. We know that the DA – and heaven knows who else – also took money from a Gupta company.[4]
The one thing one can say for certain is that those funds weren’t donated to further the cause of democracy. One can form an idea of the purpose from IFP leader Dr. Mangosuthu Buthelezi’s description of his visit to the Gupta compound from a News24Wire report.[5]
Tony Gupta apparently felt it important that “respected leaders” understand their side of the story.
He sought advice on what the family should do to rectify the negative image being created about them, said Buthelezi.
So the most obvious flaw in our political system that allowed our democracy to be stolen, is the absence of legislation regulating private funding to political parties – it literally does not exist. What legislation we have deals only with public funding.[6] It’s a sure-fire recipe for replacing democracy with people like the Guptas. From the perspective of democrats, it’s an insane thing to do, and it must be fixed.
The solution is blindingly obvious: substantially increase public funding to political parties for “the costs of democracy”[7] and do away with private contributions. All private contributions. Supporters of a party can give of their own time, but nothing else. No free venues, transport, media advertising, nothing (unless all parties have access to the same thing perhaps, under strict conditions). Remember the blood funnel?
There’s absolutely no reason we shouldn’t do it.
Costs? For every Rand of our tax money we spend on our political system, we’re likely to save ten in the prevention of capture and corruption, even if one includes the cost of rigorously policing the system. It’s logical: those who give generally want more in return, usually much more, otherwise it wouldn’t make “business sense” to make such a relatively risky “investment”.
The problem will persist for as long as private funding to political parties are allowed. Even if public funding is increased, private funds, inevitably with conditions attached, would still be disproportionately influential, and the doors for dark money would remain open.
And while requiring political parties to disclose donors is something that should have been done right from the dawn of our democracy, it doesn’t solve the problem of capture. It would just result in:
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A decrease in funding to political parties (which are, after all, essential to the functioning of democracy).
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A different set of funders, whose priority is also not our democracy.
The main challenge would be to make sure that parties are adequately funded, independently of the government of the day, but the advantage of being a young democracy is that many others have battled with the same problems we’re facing – we can pick our solutions, then tweak them for our specific needs. (I’m not saying we shouldn’t blaze trails when necessary, only that we generally don’t have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to democratic political systems.)
But if private political funding is the most obvious flaw in our political system, it’s unfortunately not the only one. In Part 4 I discuss the four other obvious causes of our current woes.
Footnotes
Click on the footnote number to go back to where you were.
[1] To borrow Matt Taibbi’s famous phrase on Goldman Sachs in his Rolling Stone article The Great American Bubble Machine. (“The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”)
[2] Study: US Congress Literally Doesn’t Care What You Think
[3] Getting Big Money Out of Politics and Restoring Democracy
[4] Gupta executive donated R200,000 to DA: Zille
[5] Buthelezi: My single visit to the Gupta home is not newsworthy
[7] The term was coined by Alexander Heard, author of a pioneering study on US campaign finance, The Costs of Democracy, published in 1960.
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