OPINION | Human and constitutional rights destroy life in the name of life

George Orwell’s immortal axiom – “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others” – remains the most apt diagnosis of our world’s political condition. It captures the deception at modernity’s heart: thathuman rights, democracy, the constitution, and the rule of law emancipate, when in truth they destroy life in the name of life. Human rights, democracy, the constitution, and the law are encryptors of power and a grand simulacrum presenting domination as liberation.

These are the chief enablers of imperialism and the internationalisation of suffering. The theory of the encryption of power, developed by Ricardo Sanín-Restrepo, provides the scaffolding. The theory shows that coloniality operates by simulating democracy and encrypting power.

The greatest trick of encrypted power is to present a world of violence, racism, famine, war,genocides, and epistemicides as the unalterable truth. Democracy is not merely compatible with coloniality; it is its most seductive disguise. The constitution is the master encryptor: through it, racial, gender, and national hierarchies are established; the commons privatised, and democracy destroyed in its own name while capitalism is installed as the sole global truth.

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Nowhere is this simulacrum more viscerally exposed than in SA, which possesses one of the world’s most celebrated constitutions, yet where the majority remain dispossessed. The 1996 constitution enshrines the rights to dignity, equality, housing, healthcare, food, water, and education. On paper, it is a monument to human rights.

In practice, a monument to their encryption. Three decades on, SA is the most unequal society on earth. Over 60% live below the poverty line; unemployment exceeds 40%.

The spatial geography of apartheid – townships, informal settlements, and land dispossession – remains structurally intact. The constitution encrypted this geography under a new lexicon of rights. Land was not redistributed but ownership was entrenched under Section 25, hiding racial lines of dispossession behind the language of private property.

The “hidden people”, excluded from full legal protection and abandoned to market violence, constitute the majority. Invoked as the sovereign people, they are structurally excluded from substantive sovereignty. Sanín-Restrepo writes: “‘We the People’ is the most terrifying fusion of power and the purest form of violence under an impermeable armour of legitimacy [where] the people become the transcendent and mystical model of their own exclusion.

Injustice is naturalised as justice. Crime as law.” The Constitutional Court’s celebrated judgments – Grootboom in 2001 and the Treatment Action Campaign in 2002 – are hailed as global exemplars. Yet, Irene Grootboom died homeless in 2008, evicted from the land she had litigated to occupy.

The right was vindicated; the life was not. The rule of law is the umbilical cord uniting neoliberalism with constitutionalism. In SA, this manifests in the criminalisation of land occupations, mass evictions, and state violence against resisters. Resistance is encrypted as crime; dispossession as property rights; imperialism as development.

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