Elections an expensive affair

Contesting in elections is expensive in Zimbabwe making it essential that political parties have funding for them to take part in the polls. Since the current threshold for accessing public funding in Zimbabwe only benefits two MDC formations and ZANU (PF), smaller political parties have to depend on other sources of support for survival.

The Political Parties (Finance) Act [Chapter 2:11] of 2001 makes it illegal for parties to receive foreign funding; hence they have limited avenues to source funds for their activities.
Even parties receiving public funding fund raise privately to supplement their State grants, and this might include raising funds beyond the limits of the law.

Since Zimbabwe, is new to multiparty democracies, transition programmes meant to promote multiparty democracy should be encouraged.

In most countries where multiparty democracy is a new phenomenon incumbents use shortage of financial resources as an excuse to deprive small parties funding. “As far as such rulers and their ruling parties are concerned, public funding of political parties, which also benefits the opposition parties, would amount to propping up the opposition while eroding the advantages that incumbency confers,” quoted from a ZESN position paper entitled “The Regulation of Political Parties in Zimbabwe: Registration, Finance and Other Support.”

 “Healthy political parties are often well-resourced political machines and the more resourced they are, the more they are likely to be in electoral contests”, says ZESN.

He said fortunes of parties are largely determined by the resources they have; their capacity to sponsor candidates and organise effective campaigns is largely determined by access to resources.

Democracy does not come cheaply and therefore, state funding is needed for all political parties in countries with fragile democracies where the governing party has inexhaustible access to state resources that it routinely abuses to bolster its party activities and to campaign in elections against enfeebled opposition parties.

Public funding of political parties contributes to the consolidation of democracy in the following ways, among others:

·         Creates relatively equal opportunities for political parties to set up their structures and run election campaigns;

·         Encourages all political players to channel their ambitions through the democratic process

·         Promotes relatively equal strength for political parties and offers the populace choices.

·         Voting is a constitutional right so the state must subsidise the assertion of that right.

·         The need to reduce the advantage some parties might have by receiving far greater support than others,

·         To avoid reliance on foreign funding by political parties, which is in any event prohibited in many countries; and

·         To discourage political parties from resorting to unlawful means of mobilising financial resources.

In 1997 after the United Parties took the government to court, the Supreme Court ruled that public funding of political parties was acceptable as it unhindered freedom of political expression essential to the proper functioning of a democratic system.