South Africans are no strangers to political excess. But there is a difference between excess and abdication bordering on treason. The recent episode following the US’ unlawful seizure of Venezuela’s president crossed that line. A right-wing Volkstaat-aligned social media account openly mused about Donald Trump “running” South Africa after capturing a foreign head of state. That grotesque fantasy was disturbing enough. What made it dangerous was that it was not repudiated by mainstream right-wing leadership, but met instead with applause.
Corné Mulder, leader of the Freedom Front Plus, did not distance himself from this authoritarian spectacle. On the contrary, he publicly welcomed the “toppling” of Venezuela’s government, framing the episode as a triumph over socialism. In doing so, he endorsed not merely an outcome, but a method. And the method was lawlessness.
Let us be clear about what occurred. The forcible capture of a sitting foreign head of state by the US was not law enforcement, humanitarian intervention or moral rescue. It was a violation of international law, plain and unadorned. There was no claim of self-defence under article 51 of the United Nations Charter. There was no authorisation by the Security Council. There is no recognised doctrine in international law that permits one state to abduct the leader of another because it disapproves of his governance. None.
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That such an act was executed by a superpower does not sanitise it. It aggravates it. Power does not launder illegality. It exposes it.
Nor does the episode survive scrutiny under American constitutional law. The US Constitution fragments war powers precisely to prevent unilateral executive adventurism. Congress, not the president, is vested with the authority to declare war. The seizure of a foreign leader abroad is the very sort of executive overreach the framers sought to restrain. When legality is discarded both internationally and domestically, what is being displayed is not resolve, but institutional corrosion.
Tasteless applause
Against this backdrop, the applause from right-wing South African quarters is not merely tasteless. It is revealing. It reveals a politics increasingly comfortable with the idea that force, not law, is the proper instrument of change, provided it is wielded against ideological enemies. Today it is Caracas. Tomorrow it is Pretoria.
What deepens the irony is the moral posture from which this applause is usually delivered. South African right-wing politics, including the Freedom Front Plus, routinely presents itself as a crusade against corruption, misgovernance and state malfeasance. Yet when the moment comes to signal virtue, it is not to constitutional restraint or clean governance that some now look to, but to the most corrupt president in US history.
Donald Trump is not a symbol of legality restored. He is a monument to institutional decay: impeached twice, indicted repeatedly and habitually contemptuous of constitutional limits. To denounce corruption at home while seeking deliverance from a foreign leader whose career has been a masterclass in self-dealing, obstruction and disdain for the rule of law is not principle. It is farce.
One cannot credibly defend constitutional order while genuflecting before a man who treats the law as a nuisance and the presidency as a personal instrument. To allow this posture to pass without consequence would itself be a dereliction, which is why President Cyril Ramaphosa should make it clear that the Freedom Front Plus has no place in a Government of National Unity unless its leader, Mulder, issues an unambiguous public apology to the nation for endorsing lawless authoritarian conduct.
Mulder’s celebration matters because it normalises the unthinkable. One need not harbour illusions about Venezuela to grasp the principle at stake. If states may kidnap leaders they dislike, then international law collapses into a catalogue of preferences. Sovereignty becomes conditional. Law becomes decorative. And smaller states like South Africa learn, to their peril, that rules apply only until power intervenes.
The Volkstaat fantasy of Trump “running” South Africa is therefore not an isolated provocation. It is the logical endpoint of a worldview that has lost faith in constitutional self-government and now looks outward to foreign strongmen for salvation. It is the language of those who no longer trust their own people, their own institutions or the discipline of law.
Constitutional self-respect
South Africa’s Constitution was not written as an aspirational pamphlet. It was forged in response to authoritarianism, racial hierarchy and the systematic abuse of power. Its foundational premise is uncompromising: no individual, party or faction governs by whim. Authority flows from law. Law flows from democratic consent. To applaud the overthrow of constitutional order abroad, or to fantasise about its suspension at home, is to treat sovereignty as a joke and self-rule as an inconvenience.
The irony becomes suffocating. The Freedom Front Plus routinely invokes constitutionalism, minority protection and property rights. Yet here its leader finds cause for celebration in an act that trampled sovereignty, violated international law and relied on naked force. A movement hysterical about expropriation without compensation suddenly discovers serenity when a superpower expropriates an entire country’s leadership by force. Principles, it seems, are portable only when they travel west.
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South Africans know where contempt for law leads. We lived under a system that justified repression in the name of necessity, order and civilisational salvation. We dismantled it not because it failed to deliver efficiency, but because it failed to deliver justice. To now indulge authoritarian nostalgia imported from abroad is not merely unserious. It is reckless.
This is why South Africa needs more than rhetorical condemnation. It needs tightly drawn legislation that makes explicit that conduct deliberately aimed at undermining the constitutional order and national sovereignty constitutes a serious criminal offence. No constitutional democracy is obliged to provide sanctuary to those who invite its subjugation or celebrate its potential overthrow. Democracies are not suicide pacts.
This is not a novel idea. Germany, shaped by the devastation wrought by constitutional collapse, treats speech and conduct aimed at dismantling the democratic order as unconstitutional. Its Basic Law rests on the principle of a militant democracy, one that defends itself against those who seek to abolish it. This is not repression. It is constitutional self-respect.
Such legislation would also rest on firm international law foundations. The protective principle of jurisdiction permits a state to criminalise acts that threaten its fundamental security, constitutional integrity and political independence, even where elements of that conduct occur beyond its borders. Sovereignty in international law is not passive. It carries with it the right of self-preservation.
Mulder may insist that criticism misses the point, that Venezuela’s failures justify extraordinary measures. They do not. The test of commitment to law is not how one treats friends, but how one treats adversaries. When law is applauded only when it flatters ideology, it ceases to be law.
The real danger here is not Trump, nor Venezuela. It is the ease with which some South African political actors are willing to cheer the destruction of legal order elsewhere, and to flirt, however jokingly, with its suspension at home. History is unforgiving of such indulgence. Constitutional democracy rarely collapses with a coup. It erodes through applause. DM
Professor Ziyad Motala is a legal scholar and professor at the Howard University School of Law. He previously served as director of the Comparative and International Law Programme at the University of the Western Cape and held the position of honorary professor of law at that university’s School of Law.