The inevitability of foreign funding of political parties

During the 1970s liberation war, Joshua Nkomo’s Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA) was trained in and funded by Russia. Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA) was Chinese-trained and also funded by the Chinese government during the same war. The two military wings were united in wanting an independent Zimbabwe and they prevailed. It is therefore common cause that there is no noble political mission whose objectives can be achieved without sustainable finance. If the country’s major military wings during the significant liberation struggle sought external funding, this then means that even to this day, there is a crying need for political parties in Zimbabwe to seek funding beyond the borders albeit legitimately.

Zimbabwe Election Network [ZESN] has undertaken numerous studies on how and why political parties require sustainable funding. Democracy and political competition is stifled where parties lack finance. Zimbabwe’s electoral process is generally in two stages: where a candidate battles it out with those of his/her party in primaries and then having to contend with more of other political parties. This costs money.

Until the passage of the Political Parties (Finance) Act of 1992 in Zimbabwe, there was no provision for the financing of political parties. Even though, candidates from all the three beneficiating parties in the GNU will argue that party financing will never be enough. The Act itself is not exhaustive since it leaves a lot of room for abuse. By prohibiting political parties and candidates from receiving funds from foreign donors, one would assume it plugs the holes on what exactly ‘legitimate’ funds can be used for. It is common cause that parties channel some of the funds to institutional cost centres that have very little to do with democracy.

Moreover, the ‘big budgets’ that are reflected from the expenditures of both ZANU-PF and MDC-T raise a lot of questions on where additional funds come from. Membership fees, merchandise sales and other ‘donations’ from internal sources do not match some expenditure flouted by the two political parties. Of late, MDC’s Professor Welshman Ncube has been questioned by ‘small’ parties where he secures funds to ‘flood’ his constituents with bicycles!  

Although major political parties often accuse each other of being bankrolled by foreign donors with imperial motives, no convictions under the current Act are on record. ZANU-PF officials routinely embark on trips to the Far East and MDC officials travel mostly to western countries. There is no regulatory framework in place to audit such trips.

Fringe political parties like Mavambo Kusile Dawn [MKD], ZAPU, ZLP and MDC99 have always sought to either discredit the Act or push for its repeal. They argue that barring foreign funding of political parties is a brainchild of ZANU-PF aimed at incapacitating the then opposition parties which were seen as a threat to the party’s perpetual political hegemony. However, political scientist Eldred Masunungure seems to concur with ZESN studies that as long as the regulatory framework is porous, fringe political parties can still source funds without breaking the law.

Small parties have a point. Political parties need money to operate and there is no doubt that strong democracies require healthy political parties and in turn, political parties require resources to sustain and operate a basic party structure, to contest elections and to contribute to policy debate. This helps in promoting democracy in general, rather than mere electoral competition. 

By Jeffrey Moyo