By Destine Nde
On 23 September, the non-government organisation My Vote Counts (MVC) gave an ultimatum to 20 political parties in South Africa to disclose their coalition prospects before the 4 November Local Government Elections (LGE). The deadline was 17:00 on Monday 5 October.
The ultimatum was given to all 18 parties currently represented in the National Assembly, plus two others: the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the Africa Mayibuye Movement. These latter two were selected because of the influence they are expected to have after the elections.
In the letter, the MVC asserted that voters deserve to know how ‘they will approach coalition negotiations both before and after the upcoming elections’, explaining that the ‘information is necessary for voters to exercise their constitutional rights’: for, according to section 19 of the Constitution, read together with the right of access to information stipulated in Section 32, voters need to know beforehand how political parties intend to use their mandates, so that they may make well-informed choices.
This makes a lot of sense. For instance, I would certainly change my choice if I knew that the party I was planning to vote for would end up forming a coalition with a party I do not support.
“Voters should not have to vote for one party and discover only after the election that their vote has helped produce a governing arrangement they would never have supported,’ said the MVC Advocacy Lead, Noxolo Mfocwa, on the My Vote Counts website.
Joel Bregman, Project Lead: Money in Politics at MVC, added: “When agreements [coalitions] are negotiated in secret as exchanges for political positions or access to public resources, residents pay the price through unstable government and interrupted services.”
The importance of this sort of voter awareness in a young democracy cannot be overstated – especially at a time when interests in politics and belief in democracy are waning (see Democracy under siege part 1).
‘While many citizens continue to affirm voting as a civic duty,’ wrote Toverview’s editor, Riaan de Villiers, ‘the research indicates a notable decline in support for democracy as the preferred system of governance, alongside rising levels of political disengagement and disillusionment’.
MVC is a non-partisan CSO that began as a public campaign in 2012. Its founders envisioned a democracy in which everyone has equal influence over decisions affecting them. It registered as a non-profit organisation in 2016, and embarked on a fourfold mission aimed at bolstering South Africa’s faltering democracy, namely political transparency, accountability, public inclusiveness and participation.
Among others, it focuses on political party funding. It wants to know where political parties and their candidates are getting their money from, thereby exposing hidden agendas and undeclared interests. By secretly donating huge sums of money to fund the campaigns of specific parties and candidates, wealthy individuals can exert considerable political influence, without any accountability. According to a British political researchers, Noreena Hertz, this amounts to renting parliamentarians as well as government officials’.
The MVC also advocates electoral systems that would improve representation and accountability, as well as improved democratic practices with political parties.
Vitally, it also seeks to revitalise public interest in politics by educating civil society organisations and citizens about their political rights and civil duties, notably their right to hold their public representatives to account.
In fact, as early as 2015, MVC went to the Constitutional Court to seek greater disclosure of political party funding. In 2018 the Constitutional Court confirmed that ‘such information are indeed important for voters to exercise their political rights effectively’, and ordered it to be made ‘reasonably accessible’, resulting in the adoption of the Political Party Funding Act in 2021. It also promoted independent candidate in the 2024 elections.
The MVC has promised to publish all the answers it receives about parties’ coalition plans, and to name those that did not respond.