Some donors were Western nations, but most help came from the former Soviet Union and dictators
In 2009 SA media began reporting that the ANC had received financial support for its election campaigns from Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. The ANC has denied these allegations.
However, in his new book, Witness to Power, former ANC treasurer-general Mathews Phosa has confirmed that these reports were in fact accurate. He reveals that the ANC received money from Gaddafi over several years, through successive treasurers-general. British sources estimate that the total amount exceeded $10m.
While Gaddafi is the most high-profile example of foreign donations, he is by no means the only one. A pattern of country-sponsored financial support dates back to the era when the ANC was a liberation movement.
While in exile the movement had limited independent means of financing its activities and relied heavily on the support of international donors. While some of these donors were Western countries, such as Sweden, the majority of assistance came from the former Soviet Union.
After SA became a democratic nation in 1994 the ANC continued to depend on external sources of funding to finance its election campaigns. In August 1994 then deputy president Thabo Mbeki admitted that the ANC had sustained itself “on the basis of donations by foreign governments and supporters”.
In January 2001 Nigerian journalist Tayo Odunlami reported in The News (Lagos) that Nigerian dictator Gen Sani Abacha had provided tens of millions of dollars to help fund the ANC’s 1994 election campaign.
Abubakar Atiku Bagudu, who pleaded guilty to helping Abacha plunder the Nigerian state of billions of dollars, claimed in an affidavit that some of these funds had been used to contribute to the ANC’s 1994 election. According to Bagudu, the amount was $50m.
This practice of relying on foreign donations continued beyond the 1994 election. In a report to the ANC’s national conference in December 1997, the treasurer-general’s office stated that the party had “largely depended on friendly countries and institutions for its funds” and was “dependent on the president’s initiatives and those of some officials for income”.
In April 1999 Nelson Mandela acknowledged that president Suharto of Indonesia (like many Javanese he had only one name) had given the ANC a total of $60m. Similarly, in 2011 senior ANC officials were implicated in corrupt activities related to Iraq’s oil-for-food programme, which had been overseen by president Saddam Hussein. While many of the ANC’s election donations have come from authoritarian regimes, the involvement of democracies should also be noted. In March 2002, Taipei-based Next Magazinerevealed that Taiwan had made a $10m payment to the ANC in June 1994.
The magazine reported that a senior ANC official had approached the Taiwanese president after Mandela’s inauguration, asking for $20m to pay off the party’s election debts.
The request was motivated by concerns in Taiwan that the ANC would switch diplomatic recognition to China, which had opposed the apartheid government and was more sympathetic to the ANC. In the end, Taiwan contributed $10m and the ANC delayed its official recognition of China for about 30 months after 1994.
Taiwan is important, as it shows that foreign donations to the ANC tend to coincide with diplomatic advantages for the contributing party. Another example is the case of Indonesia, whose $60m donation came during a period when SA refrainedfrom criticising that country’s poor human rights record.
When president Suharto was granted a state visit, it came with a 21-gun salute and the country’s highest honour, the Order of Good Hope (Grand Cross). Similarly with Nigeria, where the timing of the donation corresponded with the ANC adopting an unusually demure response to the arrest and execution of human rights activists under the regime of Gen Sani Abacha.
ANC allies such as the Polisario Front have previously criticised the governing party for delaying recognition of Western Sahara’s independence — recognition had been promised by the newly elected ANC government in 1994, but only materialised in 2004. The implication of the criticism was that this delay was due to influence from Morocco, which also claims the territory.
The ANC denied this accusation. In addition, election financing reports from the Electoral Commission of SA (IEC) show that the ANC received donations in recent elections from a mining company linked to a Russian oligarch. The SA government has been criticised for backing Russia after that country invaded Ukraine in 2022.
More recently, allegations have surfaced that the ANC drove a process to take Israel to the International Court of Justice during its war with Hamas due to its relationship with Iran. Such allegations regarding Iran and SA and their diplomatic engagements are not new. In 2004 a Turkish company alleged in court that SA was involved in a package of bribes to help MTN (then under the chairship of now President Cyril Ramaphosa) to secure a major telecommunications contract with the Islamic Republic.
Part of this package was diplomatic support for Iran in international forums. SA would go on to become an indispensable ally to Iran at the International Atomic Energy Agency in relation to Western pressure over its nuclear weapons programme. The ANC and MTN have denied these allegations.
Despite anti-apartheid rhetoric, Iran supported the apartheid government as a top supplier of sanctions-busting oil. In exchange, the mullahs of the Islamic state gratefully accepted arms from the apartheid military manufacturing sector to support their war with Iraq.
By the end of apartheid, Iranian oil constituted 65%-90% of SA’s consumption, according to some estimates. Despite this complicity, the ANC continued engagements with Iran after the arrival of the democratic era, including the MTN deal and SA lobbying for Iran to be included in the Brics bloc.
The MTN deal also tracks a subtle but important shift in the country’s relationship with the Palestinians. During the exile period the ANC was a partner to the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO), a fellow leftist and secular group engaged in violent liberation struggle. After 1994 relations with the Palestinians were excellent and the ANC even made provision for a Palestinian delegation to be hosted in Pretoria — paid by the SA taxpayer.
However in 2015, without informing its PLO partners and much to their displeasure, the ANC hosted the leaders of Hamas in the country and signed a co-operation agreement. Hamas is a religious fundamentalist group that is a proxy of Iran and considered an opposition force to the PLO. The planning of this Hamas deal with the ANC reportedly took nine years to put together — a timeline in proximity to the uptick in Iran-SA relations.
This agreement was supposedly between the political parties and was not a governmental-level agreement. However, after the October 7 2023 attacks on Israel, Hamas publicly thanked then international relations & co-operation minister Naledi Pandor for a phone call in which Hamas claimed she congratulated it on the attack.