My organisation, Futurelect, this week released the “Cost of Politics Study” — a report produced with the Westminster Foundation for Democracy (WFD), whose aim is to better understand the costs — both seen and unseen — of running for elected office in South Africa.
In line with the cost of politics approach developed by the WFD, the project combined comprehensive information-gathering and interviews with successful and unsuccessful candidates in the 2024 elections. Special attention was given to women and young candidates, who remain underrepresented in political office.
Our political discourse often laments the lack of “participation” by young people and women in politics and elections, and despairs of the surfeit of men and old leaders in our parliaments and government. But these conversations rarely address the question of how much it costs them — in money, opportunity cost, time and personal reputation — to make the transition into elected and government leadership. Our partnership with the WFD sought to better understand the true cost of running for office.
Though South Africa’s closed-list proportionally representative-based elections are predominantly party-led — and therefore funded by political parties from a common resource pool — the 2024 candidates interviewed all reported personal campaign expenditure ranging from R17,000 to R1m. The median expenditure was R50,000. In a country with a median monthly income of R5,417, this is out of reach of most.
The prohibitive cost of running for elected office in South Africa is most prevalent among candidates of small and new parties, and among independent candidates. This renders elections a space favourable to incumbents, further narrowing the scope for better age and gender diversity.
We know a great deal about the cost of politics in the West, where research, data and reporting are plentiful, and point to increasingly dysfunctional systems in countries where political candidacy is effectively out of reach of all but the elite, wealthy and highly connected.
Just last month in April Elon Musk engaged in an unsuccessful bid to finance the election of a Republican candidate in a judicial race — an effort that cost an obscene $21m (R378m).
According to Open Secrets, the nonprofit, nonpartisan US research organisation that tracks money in politics, the average congressional candidate needed $2.8m (R50m) to win a seat in 2022, up from $1.5m (R27m) in 2012. The average Senate candidate needed $26.5m (R477m) to win in 2022, up from R207m 10 years earlier.
Of course, the numbers in South Africa don’t come close to these — not least because our closed- list PR electoral system places the burden of fundraising on political parties as a whole, leaving decisions on how funds are distributed to party leaders. But even here, the uneven distribution of financial resources inevitably favours influential incumbents, to the detriment of first-time candidates. Getting onto a party list is the biggest challenge; it was at the candidate selection stage, and again at the peak of the election campaign, that the individuals surveyed reported the greatest personal expenditure.
For women, these costs are inflated by the need to look good. In addition, women often had to hire personal security personnel for late-night meetings and drivers for their children.
According to one of the interviewees, “running for office is expensive but for women, it’s more than money. It’s safety, family, respectability, fighting battles that men don’t even see.”
Nowhere in our study was the crippling cost of political candidature more evident, however, than in the experiences of unsuccessful candidates. For smaller-party and independent candidates in particular, the post-election period was a time when they had to deal with the added stress of unpaid debts, depression, social isolation and inability to re-enter the workforce, having publicly declared their political affiliations.
The recommendations flowing from the Cost of Politics report include strengthening political party support for election candidates, especially women and young people, and a review of the allocation of public funding for political parties — a system which disproportionately favours political parties that already enjoy representation in the legislature. Among the most compelling of the recommendations is post-election support for candidates who lose. Initiatives such as financial counselling, career transition assistance and psychosocial support would go a long way towards helping losing candidates pivot successfully and possibly consider another run.
An electoral system which confers structural advantages on candidates who are wealthy, older and male risks entrenching the very status quo in which political leadership lacks the best and brightest our society has to offer. The success of better, more representative candidates in public office can only attract more such individuals to a sector which is urgently in need of leadership reform.
• Mazibuko is co-founder & CEO of Futurelect
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