The Electoral Matters Amendment Bill is a thinly veiled response, by the ruling party, to the impact new parties are having on changing the shape of South African politics.

Acting under cover of a Constitutional Court judgement requiring amendments to enable independent candidates to stand in elections, the sponsors of the bill are taking the wholly unrelated, and uncalled for, opportunity to throttle opposition parties by changing the way that public political funding is distributed.

If they get their way, they pocket 25% more money than they presently receive, while a party such as ours must make do with 50% less.

The formula by which public money is distributed to political parties, to enable our multi-party democracy, was altered just three years ago.

According to the ruling party’s own policy documents, it was altered with the express intention of supporting political diversity and preventing the system from being skewed in favour of incumbents.

What is now being proposed seeks to achieve the exact opposite. 

Three years ago the Constitutional Court ordered that insofar as the Electoral Act makes it impossible for candidates to stand for political office, without being members of political parties, it is unconstitutional.

That is the cover that brings us here today… to give effect to the consequential changes required by the adoption of a new electoral system.

The 2024 elections will be contested by 115 political parties and 16 independent for the national assembly. These are pretty significant indicators of the vibrancy, resilience and credibility of our multi-party democracy. 

We know that the ability of political parties to organise, promote their views and participate in free and fair elections are sacrosanct, because the Constitutional Court explicitly told us so in 2017.

The court said: “Laws… which undermine multi party democracy will be invalid.”

This judgement, in a matter brought by the UDM, gave expression to the values of our democracy contained in Section 1 of the Constitution: “Universal adult suffrage, a national common voters roll, regular elections and a multi-party system of democratic government, to ensure accountability, responsiveness and openness.”

There’s nothing ambiguous about that.

The Electoral Matters Amendment Bill, on the other hand, goes so far beyond the rational and reasonable requirements of amending legislation to facilitate independent candidates that it’s impossible to tell if it’s chicken or beef.

The bill has been hijacked to include unnecessary amendments to undermine multi-party democracy and violate the spirit and letter of the UDM judgment.

Fiddling with the allocation of public funding to represented political parties and independents violates the spirit of our constitution, our values, and judgments of the Constitutional court.

It is intended to defund opposition parties and must be resisted.