AfriForum insists its trans-Atlantic charm offensive was no more than free speech dressed up in diplomatic attire. Ernst Roets toured Washington and Canberra clutching a dossier of farm-murder horror stories, selling the fable of a “white genocide” and pleading for punitive action against his own country. He left satisfied; the Trump administration promptly threatened South Africa with sanctions, visa bans and the possible suspension of AGOA trade benefits. On Pretoria’s streets the price was paid in bodies.

Sanctions rarely arrive with a whistle like a bomb, yet their impact is explosive all the same. Treasury bean-counters scramble to plug the resulting hole in revenue; police salaries are delayed; overtime is cancelled. Officers facing shrinking pay-packets are quick to reach for the baton and the live round when township unrest flares. Land-rights activists—already framed by AfriForum’s narrative as agents of genocide—become soft targets for “pre-emptive” repression. A late-night knock, a shot in the dark, no warrant, no body-cam: the tell-tale pattern of extrajudicial killing the Minnesota Protocol warns about and our Constitution expressly forbids.

Roets and his backers cannot pretend surprise. The scholarly record is vast and grim. Rhodesia in the 1960s, Iraq in the 1990s, Venezuela after 2017: starve a state of cash and it feeds on its own citizens. AfriForum was repeatedly warned. DIRCO briefings laid out the social cost of trade penalties; labour federations predicted blood on the shop-floor if jobs evaporated. Roets shrugged and pressed on, proclaiming that “international force is the only option left”.

That shrug is not political bluster—it is dolus eventualis, the legal heartbeat of treason. Under South African criminal law, a person acts with dolus eventualis when they foresee a forbidden outcome and embrace it as an acceptable price for their goal. AfriForum foresaw that foreign coercion would cripple the state and ratchet up violence; it welcomed the risk because the bigger the chaos, the stronger the leverage to freeze land reform. Call it by its common-law name: betraying the Republic.

The usual riposte is freedom of expression. Yet the Bill of Rights draws a clear line: speech that incites imminent harm enjoys no sanctuary. Crying “genocide” where none exists is more than hyperbole; it is a dog-whistle to foreign hawks and local vigilantes alike. One need only glance at the surge in armed “boer protection” patrols after AfriForum’s Washington jaunt to see how the narrative hardens triggers into action.

There is also the convenient dodge that Washington’s decision was sovereign and thus breaks any causal chain. Our courts are not so easily misled. They ask whether the outcome was a reasonable and foreseeable consequence of the accused’s conduct. Sanctions in response to a choreographed moral panic? As foreseeable as sunrise. The United States even spelled out its reasoning in press releases echoing AfriForum’s briefing notes almost word for word. Influence need not be decisive; it must merely be material—and the paper trail of meetings, podcasts and FARA-registered lobbying contracts more than meets that standard.

Some will mutter that treason is an archaic charge, rolled out only for coup plotters in camouflage. Nonsense. Treason protects constitutional sovereignty, not party flags or presidential motorcades. When a well-funded pressure group enlists a foreign power to twist Pretoria’s arm, it strikes at the very nerve centre the crime was designed to defend. The High Court confirmed as much in S v Harris (1952), convicting defendants who funnelled intelligence abroad without firing a shot. The principle is unchanged: you may criticise government, but you may not invite outsiders to batter it into submission.

If the National Prosecuting Authority baulks at the optics of a treason trial, it still faces the ICC Act’s uncompromising reach. Aiding or abetting crimes against humanity carries universal jurisdiction, and the Rome Statute treats systematic extrajudicial killings as just that. Evidence that lobbying paved the road to lethal police raids would drag AfriForum into a courtroom whether or not the charge-sheet carries the T-word.

Beyond the legal calculus lies a political imperative. South Africa’s bargain of 1994 was fragile to begin with; it cannot withstand a precedent that outsources our policy debates to foreign strongmen. If AfriForum walks unscathed, every aggrieved faction will learn the lesson: skip the ballot box, shop your grievance in Washington, wait for the rands to tumble and the rubber bullets to fly. That path leads to a broken republic and a queue of grieving families outside mortuaries.

Ernst Roets likes to ask who will protect his community when the state fails. The honest answer is that the state begins to fail when citizens like him decide its laws and institutions are expendable bargaining chips on Capitol Hill. Accepting foreign sanctions at the cost of South African lives is not patriotism; it is collusion. And collusion, when it endangers the very sovereignty that guarantees all our rights, crosses the line into treason.

The NDPP should enrol the indictment. If it lacks the nerve, the families of those shot dead in sanctioned austerity’s shadow will eventually force the issue—here or in The Hague. That day cannot come soon enough, for in a constitutional democracy the loudest defence of free expression must never drown out the quieter, irrevocable right to life.

* Gillian Schutte is a South African writer, filmmaker, and critical-race scholar known for her radical critiques of neoliberalism, whiteness, and donor-driven media. Her work centres African liberation, social justice, and revolutionary thought.

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.

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