The Electoral Commission (IEC) report for the fourth quarter of the 2025/2026 financial year (January to March 2026) shows that the Democratic Alliance (DA), Rise Mzansi, and ActionSA dominated declared party funding over the period. Together, they accounted for almost all of the donations in the report.

The DA received R57.3 million, making it the largest declared fundraiser of the quarter. Rise Mzansi received R30 million, all of it from one donor. ActionSA received R9.9 million, most of it from Martin Moshal (a South African-born online gaming entrepreneur and venture capitalist now based in Australia) and the party’s founder Herman Mashaba.

That means the DA received about 59.0% of the party funding declared in the report. Rise Mzansi received 30.9%. ActionSA received 10.2%.

Political funding in South Africa is becoming more transparent, but it is not becoming more evenly spread. A small group of donors now plays an outsized role in financing the country’s opposition parties.

The DA’s biggest declared donor was Fynbos Kapitaal, which gave R13m. Fynbos Ekwiteit gave another R10m. Together, the two Fynbos entities gave the DA R23m, equal to 40.1% of the party’s declared funding for the quarter.

Those entities have been linked to Michiel le Roux, one of the founders of Capitec and among the most successful businessmen produced by South Africa’s post-apartheid banking sector. The Fynbos donations therefore indicate that DA continues to draw support from the upper end of South Africa’s financial and entrepreneurial class.

A further R10m, equal to 17.4% of the DA’s declared funding, came from Main Street 1564, a private South African company. Company search records link it to Anthony Charles Ball, a prominent private equity and investment figure associated with Brait, Value Capital Partners, Reclamation Holdings, Real Foods and other investment vehicles. Ball also has links to a pro-business think tank, the Centre for Development and Enterprise.

Mary Slack, a member of the Oppenheimer family, also gave R10m, another 17.4% of the DA’s quarterly funding. The Oppenheimer family is one of South Africa’s greatest business dynasties. Ernest Oppenheimer, Mary’s grandfather, founded the mining giants De Beers and Anglo American, two of South Africa’s historical mining juggernauts.

That means just four donors, Fynbos Kapitaal, Fynbos Ekwiteit, Main Street 1564, and Mary Slack, supplied R43m of the DA’s R 57.3m declared total. Put differently, 75.0% of the DA’s declared funding for the quarter came from four large donations.

The IEC report lists two other major individual donations as from a Mr G Ryan, who gave R4m, equal to 7.0% of the DA’s declared funding for the quarter, and a Mr D Barnes, who gave R3m, equal to 5.2%. Unlike the Fynbos entities, Main Street 1564, or Mary Slack, these individuals are not immediately identifiable as they are not linked to a company or a prominent family.

Even without identifying them further, taken together, the DA’s six largest donors supplied R50m of the party’s R57.3m declared total. That means 87.2% of the DA’s declared funding for the quarter came from just six major donations. The party therefore raised the most money in the quarter, but most of that money came from a fairly narrow donor base.

Not unusual

The point is not that the DA is unusual in relying on large donors. Modern political parties are expensive organisations, and serious national parties need serious funding. The point is that disclosure now lets voters see who is funding our political parties. In the DA’s case, most of the declared money this quarter came from a small group of wealthy individuals, family-linked capital, and business investment vehicles.

Rise Mzansi declared R30m for the quarter, and every cent came from one donor, We Are The People. That means 100.0% of Rise Mzansi’s declared funding for the quarter came from a single organisation.

That has already raised questions. Songezo Zibi, the party leader, has said the R30m started as a loan to the party before the 2024 election, and that it was later written off and therefore had to be declared as a donation. He also said We Are The People had supported other parties, including GOOD and the United Democratic Movement (UDM).

But the organisation remains difficult to pin down. A Facebook page under the We Are The People name describes it as a voluntary association formed to mobilise citizens to participate in democracy, but it has not been updated since June last year. The Common Sense could not find a clear website, YouTube channel, public leadership list, annual report, or obvious institutional footprint for the organisation.

The latest R30m declaration also does not stand alone. IEC records previously showed two R15m donations from We Are The People to Rise Mzansi, one for the declaration period of January to March 2024, and another for the declaration period of April to June 2024. We Are The People has also been recorded as giving R500 000 each to GOOD and the UDM. On that basis, Rise Mzansi appears to have received about R60m from We Are Yhe People across the relevant disclosure periods.

The concern is therefore not that the donation was undeclared. It was declared. The concern is that a relatively new party has received very large sums from an organisation whose public identity remains obscure. The IEC report tells voters the name of the donor. It does not tell them who controls it, who funds it, who sits behind it, or what wider network it belongs to.

Concentrated

ActionSA’s funding was smaller, but also highly concentrated.

The party received R9.9m in declared funding. Martin Moshal gave R5m, which was just over half of ActionSA’s quarterly funding. Herman Mashaba gave R2.9m across several donations, equal to just under a third of the party’s total.

Together, Moshal and Mashaba accounted for about 79.8% of ActionSA’s declared funding for the quarter.

The remaining R2m came from two companies. Siyaya Free to Air TV gave R1m, and African Equity Corporation gave R1m. Each accounted for 10.1% of ActionSA’s declared funding for the quarter.

African Equity Corporation is the more interesting of the two. Registry aggregator B2BHint lists Mmathebe Annah Faith Moja and Constance Matshaga Mashaba as officers of the company. Constance Matshaga Mashaba appears to match Connie Mashaba, Herman Mashaba’s wife, whose birth name was Constance Matshaga Maluka.

Connie Mashaba also appears as a director of Lephatsi Investments, another company named in the IEC report. In that report it was recorded as having donated R200 000 to ActionSA.

This makes ActionSA’s funding base look even narrower. Martin Moshal gave R5m, equal to 50.5% of the party’s declared funding. Herman Mashaba gave R2.9m, equal to 29.4%. African Equity Corporation gave another R1m, equal to 10.1%, and the available company data suggests that donor is operated by Mashaba’s wife Connie.

The African National Congress (ANC) is a different case in this report. It appears in the IEC document, but not with the same clear donor-by-donor breakdown visible for the DA, Rise Mzansi, and ActionSA. The report records an accumulated figure of R10m for the ANC, but does not have a detailed breakdown of who donated the money. That makes the ANC harder to analyse in the same way as the three parties above, but the lack of transparency is concerning in itself.

The more striking absence is the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) and the uMkhonto weSizwe Party (MKP). Neither appears in the latest donor report. That should not be read as proof that no money moved. It means that neither party reported a donation to the IEC.

It stretches credulity to believe that two large and active political machines moved through the same period without meaningful financial support of some kind from private donors. The Common Sense has previously reported on the scale of financial support political parties receive from the taxpayer. The EFF remains one of the country’s major opposition parties, while MKP entered Parliament in 2024 as a major force after winning nearly 15% of the vote and becoming the third-biggest party in the country in its first election. Both parties run expensive political operations. Yet voters are given no comparable donor trail for them in this report.

This is where Songezo Zibi has a point. In defending Rise Mzansi over the We Are The People donation, he argued that questions about political funding are often directed at liberal or centrist opposition parties, while the EFF and MKP are not pressed with the same intensity.

But the broader comparison between the DA, Rise Mzansi, and ActionSA is still revealing.

The DA has the broadest donor base, but still relies heavily on a few very large donors. Rise Mzansi has the most concentrated funding model, with one donor supplying everything it declared this quarter. ActionSA sits between the two, but its funding is still dominated by two individuals.

This is what the new party funding system has made visible. South Africans can now see not only which parties receive money, but which donors matter most inside each party’s funding structure.

The report shows a political market in which a relatively small number of wealthy individuals, family-linked vehicles, companies, foundations, and political organisations carry much of the declared funding burden.

That does not make the funding improper. Disclosure is the point of the system. But it does show where influence may begin. Political parties compete for votes in public, but they also compete for money in private. The IEC report now gives voters a better view of that second contest.

But the reporting system is also flawed if some parties, like the EFF and MKP, simply do not declare who gives them money, with no consequences.