In a constitutional democracy, civil society plays an essential role in holding the state accountable. But when private organisations begin to act as quasi-states negotiating directly with foreign powers, litigating to preserve racial privileges and constructing parallel governance systems, they cease to be mere watchdogs. They become challengers to national sovereignty.
AfriForum and its ally, Solidarity, have crossed that line.
South Africa’s democracy was built on a delicate balance: protecting minority rights while advancing equality and redress. The Constitution guarantees both. Yet, under the guise of “civil rights”, AfriForum and Solidarity have steadily positioned themselves as protectors of minority dominance, exploiting legal loopholes and international sympathy to erode the authority of the democratic state.
Their actions may appear to be benign community upliftment, language promotion or legal activism, but beneath the surface lies a troubling strategy: to entrench autonomy from the state and to reframe South Africa’s transformation agenda as a form of persecution.
Take AfriForum’s frequent engagements with foreign governments and international media. In 2025, the organisation undertook a controversial tour of the United States, and according to TimesLIVE, lobbying right-wing politicians and media outlets to intervene in South Africa’s domestic policies.
They presented a distorted picture of the murder of white farmers and “land grabs”, deliberately undermining the legitimacy of South Africa’s land reform process and feeding global narratives that question our government’s competence. These actions were not acts of patriotism; they were attempts to internationalise internal matters, inviting external influence over our sovereign policy debates.
Solidarity, meanwhile, has been building what it proudly calls a “parallel state”:
“We must determine our future ourselves … with an approach of less state and more private.”
Its projects, from private universities and training colleges to community safety networks and energy cooperatives, are marketed as examples of self-reliance. They represent a deliberate retreat from integration, a systematic effort to construct alternative systems of service delivery that exist apart from, and often in opposition to, public institutions.
Solidarity’s Orania-like vision of self-governance protected by its own schools, labour structures and civic infrastructure fragments the social compact on which South Africa depends.
The irony is that AfriForum and Solidarity both invoke constitutionalism to justify their actions. They claim to “uphold the rule of law” and to “defend minority rights”. Yet they consistently deploy the Constitution as a shield against transformation, weaponising rights discourse to preserve historical advantage.
Preserving privilege
Their numerous court challenges against employment equity, affirmative action and language policy reforms are not about fairness; they are about freezing privilege. This selective reading of the Constitution amounts to legal opportunism dressed in moral language.
To be clear, the problem is not dissent. South Africa needs robust civil debate, including from conservative voices.
The issue is that AfriForum and Solidarity are blurring the boundary between civic participation and parallel governance. They are operating as foreign policy actors, social service providers and ideological enclaves – roles that rightfully belong to the democratic state and the collective citizenry.
When unelected private organisations begin shaping policy through international lobbying, parallel institutions, and legal obstruction, sovereignty itself is diluted.
This is not without consequence. Every time AfriForum portrays the South African government as a hostile actor before foreign audiences, it weakens our diplomatic credibility. Every time Solidarity builds another institution that serves a self-selecting minority, it chips away at the shared public sphere. These cumulative acts amount to a quiet secession not of territory, but of loyalty and participation in the national project.
What makes this particularly dangerous is the vacuum it exploits. The frustrations that fuel AfriForum’s support – poor service delivery, insecurity, corruption – are real. But rather than strengthening democracy, these organisations exploit democratic weakness to justify withdrawal.
They preach independence from the state instead of reform of the state. This logic, if left unchecked, risks normalising fragmentation where each community governs, sets policies and educates itself along racial and linguistic lines, eroding the very idea of a common South Africa.
The antidote is not censorship or confrontation, but clarity. We must call things by their name. When private organisations act as foreign policy envoys, that is not activism; it is subversion. When civil rights movements evolve into shadow states, that is not community building; it is fragmentation. And when the pursuit of minority protection becomes indistinguishable from the protection of privilege, that is not constitutionalism, it is regression.
South Africa’s sovereignty is not merely about borders or flags; it is about the shared authority of its people to decide their future collectively. AfriForum and Solidarity have every right to exist and to contribute, but not to act as states within a state. A democracy cannot thrive when its citizens are divided between those who build the nation and those who quietly build away from it. DM