Electoral Corruption:

Keeping Tabs on Politics

Say the word "corruption" and the likely responses would include statements such as "bribery", "threats" and "government payment for favours". The connotation of corruption is often regarded as large scale. However corruption takes many forms and occurs on many levels. Whether it is a bribe to the security guard at the gate to get into a soccer match or a large-scale payout by an international company to a governmental official to secure a contract, it falls within the definition of corruption. With South Africans going to the polls on 2 June 1999 to vote for representatives to the national assembly and provincial legislature, a different type of corruption — electoral corruption — becomes relevant.

While we may agree that all corruption is unethical, scales of corruption may be more or less damaging. Focus is therefore often on large-scale corruption where the damage is usually greater and more visible.

Political corruption has a long history in South Africa, but many of the forms of corruption which are associated with elections are unfamiliar to the majority of South Africans, for whom the pre-1994 elections had little meaning. The concept of electoral corruption embraces a range of practices, some of them illegal but others which are not. These include illegal attempts to influence the outcome of elections by improperly influencing electoral officials to manipulate the counting of votes.

On the other hand, when political parties promise special favours to particular groups of people in return for their votes they are not breaking the law. Even so, such behavior can be argued to constitute a form of corruption, in that political parties are offering to trade special treatment for particular groups in return for electoral support. Vote buying is another form of electoral corruption, in which political parties distribute money or material resources at political rallies. Another form of electoral corruption concerns the use of government resources: if the governing party uses publicly owned facilities to promote its electoral fortunes, then it is guilty of electoral corruption.

The National Party certainly used public facilities to its unfair advantage in elections before 1994; this was evident from any television news broadcast. Like many nationalist parties, the NP sought to establish a hegemonic presence in all kinds of public institutions as well as in major civil society organisations. Effectively this blurred the lines between party political interests and public as well as private concerns, creating a fertile field for electoral corruption.

Today, proportional representation limits the range of opportunities for localised electoral corruption. Since South African elections are not based on constituencies, political representation is less personalised and hence it is more difficult for private interests to gain influence through sponsoring particular politicians. That may be one reason for believing we are less susceptible to electoral corruption than historically. On the other hand, electioneering costs have escalated as parliamentary parties have acquired vast new constituencies who need to be reached through expensive means of communication.

Political Party Funding

In the 1994 election, the leading parties had campaign budgets of R40—R150 million — some experts believe they spent even more. In the case of the ANC, much of the organisation’s funding in 1994 was foreign, but in 1999 all the political parties will depend chiefly on local sources of finance. There are no laws which require parties to disclose their donations so there are no ways in which the public can ascertain whether particular companies receive special treatment after the election. However there are already disturbing allegations which should raise alarm signals. The recent reshuffle of Inkatha public officials has been widely interpreted as a move to replace a premier who was reluctant to manipulate casino licenses to favour a company partly owned by an important foreign donor to Inkatha. Similarly, the current scandals affecting the Mpumalanga administration grew out of the provincial ANC’s efforts to solicit campaign donations from a beneficiary of the government’s privatisation programme.

What about the less criminal kinds of electoral corruption? This should be an important concern for election monitors. In 1994, close supervision ensured non-partisan broadcasting and multi-party monitoring institutions helped to check any government propensity to deploy public resources for partisan purposes. So far, there is no reason to believe that the SABC will abandon its hard-won political independence but there are instances of this when, for example, the president, while visiting foreign governments as head of state, engages in political fundraising.

Electoral Officials

A final concern must be with the integrity of the officials who run the election. In 1994, the Independent Election Commission was admirably fair and even-handed in its treatment of political parties. The integrity of its leadership, though, was not matched by a similar calibre of official lower down in the organisation. At least 250,000 ballots were administered through "pirate" stations in Kwazulu-Natal, presumably with the connivance of local IEC personnel and in other parts of the country inquiries discovered large-scale financial misappropriation. Both of these examples suggest serious incidences of electoral corruption.

The challenges to the Independent Electoral Commission, a statutory body, tasked with managing the elections at national, provincial and local level, is to ensure that elections are free and fair precisely because the process is beyond corruption. The efficiency and organisation of the electoral process must be such that there is no room for the of corruption to be planned.

The openness of the process is vital and the role that that civil society can play as a watchdog to ensure that the integrity of the democratic process remains in tact is crucial.

Tom Lodge,
University of the Witwatersrand