Formally, political parties can be defined as “any group that presents at elections, and is capable of placing through elections, candidates for public office” (Sartori 1976, 64). They are agencies for the acquisition of power and arose as a natural outcome of the extension and expansion of the suffrage in the 19th century and they became necessary as a mechanism to organise the mass of people now legally entitled to vote. Parties are vehicles for popular mobilisation especially for purposes of interesting people to participate in elections. They are not only aggregators of peoples interests and aspirations, but parties are important in forming the opinions of voters. As Rautenbach and Malhembe point out, parties “influence public opinion and political tendencies, and form a link between the people and the government” (1999, 136). To this extent, they are indispensable to the process of the formation of the political will in a democratic society Should these political organisms be regulated and if so how? If political parties are agencies for the acquisition and exercise of power, should the public fund their power seeking activities? If, so how? What are the practices in Africa and beyond? To appreciate answers to these questions we must first note and realise that there are different types of parties and each type has its own requirements and mode of operation. One basic distinction between parties is that based on party structure and membership, which leads to the distinction between cadre and mass parties. Cadre parties have been described as a “grouping of notables” whose primary goal is attaining office (Landes 1983, 257). Membership in such parties is loosely defined, with no formal admission procedures or registration forms. The party’s ideology is general and diffuse rather than specific, and for our purposes, we note that party finance is dependent on large individual and corporate donations. Typical examples of cadre parties are North American parties (Republican and Democratic parties), the British Conservative party and most moderate Europeans parties. In contrast, the mass party “is characterised by permanent organisation and effort even between election campaigns, by formal membership requirements, and by an emphasis on ideology and platform rather than simply electoral success” (Ibid). Moreover, mass parties base their finances on individual membership dues, trade union support, and in recent years, the public financing of election campaigns. In Europe, the British Labour party is the most outstanding example. Africna political parties tend invariably to be mass parties and in Zimbabwe, the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (Zanu-PF) and its nemesis the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) are without doubt mass parties. Most if not all functional democracies have a party system by which is meant the competitive relationship between two or more political parties. The Zimbabwean party universe has been a dominant one-party system from Independence in 1980 to September 19991 when the opposition MDC was founded and has remained as a viable and serious threat to the indefinite prolongation of power by the ruling party. Since 1999, the country’s party system can effectively and justifiably be described as a two-party structure. Regulation of political parties can be said to be universal wherever these political entities exist but the mode and degree of regulation differ. It is important to stress that registration of political parties is only one of many ways of regulating political parties. In other words, regulation of political parties includes, but is not at all limited to the requirement for registration of political parties. It also does not follow that political systems that require party registration are of necessity more authoritarian and therefore less democratic than where such registration is not required. The absence of requirements for party registration may actually mask the existence of even more insidious legislation that suffocate or stifle the operations of the ‘free-to-exist’ political parties. People can form political parties as and when they wish, but then the operating environment is so hostile as to enfeeble such political 1 The party system was mildly competitive from 1980 to 1987 when there were two strong liberation war parties (PF-Zapu and Zanu-PF) before they merged in 1987 to form the unified Zanu-PF thereafter. 7