Estimates reveal how much political parties spent on their election campaigns

The ANC managed to retain overall control of the country, whereas the DA kept hold of the Western Cape for another five years. But with great power comes great sums of money – staying on top comes at a huge price in South Africa, even if both major political parties didn’t do brilliantly in the 2019 Elections.

Although the ANC and the DA will continue to govern where they left off, each party suffered noticeable losses in their voter shares. The ANC are about five percentage points down from 2014’s vote, and the DA have shed hundreds of thousands of voters at the polls this year. According to The Citizen, they spent a lot of money to fall short…

What political parties spent for the 2019 Elections

ZOE PR strategist Khanyisile Madlala told the publication that “many parties” are guilty of focusing on the shortcomings of their rivals, and fail to promote themselves adequately. She believes that a total of R2 billion was spent on campaigning by all 48 parties on the national ballot.

More than R1 billion of those funds were allegedly splurged by the ANC. Other estimates place the DA’s spending around the R600 million mark, with R400 million left over for the likes of the EFF, IFP, FF+ and the rest of the chasing pack.

The ANC is estimated to have spent about R1 billion on their election campaign.

The DA estimated to spend about R600 million.

Who funds our political parties? ?#Election2019

— Grant Caswell (@TheGrantC) May 5, 2019

Time to remove those posters… or else

However, these political organisations may want to make sure their clean-up operations are in order if they want to avoid any more heavy expenditure. As we reported earlier, all political parties have a week to remove their campaign materials from lamposts, or face a slew of fines:

The City of Cape Town is notoriously stricter than most. City Media Manager, Luthando Tyhalibongo, noted that political parties would need to remove all posters by the end of the week. On 20 May, the City of Cape Town would embark on a removal drive to rid all public infrastructure of political placards. The fines will total:

• R117 per tied poster
• R170 per pasted poster