Following the dismissal of its court application to overhaul the Political Party Funding Act (PPFA), civil society organisation My Vote Counts (MVC) announced that it is studying the judgment and consulting with its legal team, stressing that its court action is aimed at curbing “elite influence” over South Africa’s politics.

Earlier this week, President Cyril Ramaphosa signed the proclamation to double the disclosure threshold and annual donation limit in the PPFA.

The new annual donation limit will be R30-million, up from R15-million, and the new disclosure threshold will be R200 000, up from R100 000.

MVC argued that the new PPFA annual donation limit would deepen secrecy in political funding and make it easier for private interests to influence the country’s politics and for corruption to occur.

MVC launched its application seeking to overhaul the PPFA, as amended by the Electoral Matters Amendment Act, to compel parties to fully disclose all donations.

In February, MVC approached the Western Cape High Court to have the Act declared unconstitutional.

In a ruling handed down on Thursday, the Western Cape High Court found that the challenges to the pre-amended PPFA were moot owing to subsequent amendments.

The court ruled that the President's discretion to set donation limits was constitutional and did not violate legislative authority.

It said MVC failed to establish how the challenged provisions infringed constitutional rights.

The application was dismissed with no order for costs.

The MVC explained that it approached the court to strengthen voter accountability over public representatives, and to deepen the right of access to information so that voters could vote and exercise their political rights from an informed position.

“We will continue to advocate and litigate when necessary to achieve these objectives,” it said.

Meanwhile, ActionSA, a respondent in the case, welcomed the court’s judgment calling MVC’s application “misguided”.

Previously the party highlighted that while it is not opposed to transparency in political party funding, it opposed MVC’s “short-sighted application”.

It argued that the relief sought by MVC would throttle party funding by small- to medium-sized donors who choose to make donations below the current threshold for fear of political or economic reprisal.

“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 Independent Electoral Commission,” said ActionSA national chairperson Michael Beaumont.

He said the MVC case was silent on non-compliance and instead “sought to restrict” the work of newer political parties.

“… 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,” Beaumont said.