OPINION | Dangerous anti-rights movement threatens SA’s freedoms

The anti-rights movement in SA consists of a handful of loud extremists on the sidelines. It’s a carefully constructed ecosystem that feeds on fear, respectability, religion, nationalism, and the unfinished business of colonial power.

This ecosystem has many moving parts. There are conservative religious organisations like ForSA, the Muslim Judicial Council, People Against Gangsterism and Drugs (Pagad), the Family Policy Institute, and extensive church networks that reach deep into our communities.

Alongside them are far-right and populist political actors such as AfriForum or the Patriotic Alliance, that thrive on grievance politics and manufactured outrage.

At street level, formations such as Operation Dudula turn this ideology into harassment, intimidation, and violence aimed at queer people, migrants, and refugees.

On the surface, these actors may appear different, but listen closely, and the echoes are unmistakable. Conservative religious groups obsess over gender and queer lives. Nationalist and populist formations fixate on migration.

They have learnt to borrow the language of human rights, not to extend freedom but to hollow it out. Strategic litigation has become one of their sharpest weapons, enabling them to shape law and policy without ever winning public consent.

Their targets are predictable: sexual and reproductive health and rights, women’s autonomy, LGBTQIA+ lives, the very idea of gender as something complex and lived, migrants and refugees, and black and indigenous communities asserting control over their own futures.

To advance these agendas, they manufacture moral panic, cultivate fear, and run polished media and online campaigns where misinformation and political messaging blur together. Increasingly, they step into mainstream politics, laundering exclusion into a form that appears legitimate.

Within this ecosystem, different actors play different roles. Religious conservative networks focus on courts, policy submissions, and parliamentary processes, opposing comprehensive sexuality education and queer inclusion through legal technicalities and bureaucratic pressure.

At the same time, populist and nationalist movements like Operation Dudula normalise intimidation and exclusion, especially against migrants. Political parties then absorb elements of this platform, converting social hostility into policy pressure.

The consequences are tangible. They appear as xenophobic vigilantism and attacks on migrants; as coordinated campaigns against sexuality education and queer visibility; as a policy environment where court cases and street mobilisation combine to stall or reverse rights in practice, and as rising hate speech and hate crimes that make our communities less safe.

These movements braid together anxieties about gender, sexuality, migration, religion, race, and power, and this is what gives them political force.

Because of that, they can speak at once to religious communities, nationalist voters, and people who are rightly angry about economic inequality but are offered scapegoats instead of justice.

They are also deeply transnational. What we face here is tied to global networks that move ideas, money, and strategy across borders.

It explains how local groups suddenly gain access to legal expertise or funding, and why pressure intensifies around election periods or key international policy moments.

At the centre of this ecosystem sit three overlapping coalitions that reinforce one another. First, well-funded religious conservative legal and policy networks that provide litigation, lobbying, and donor money.

Second, far-right nationalists who bind anti-migrant sentiment to fantasies of cultural purity and political dominance.

Third, digital advocacy and grassroots amplification platforms that scale messages quickly and cheaply.

This formation is dangerous not only because of the strength of each part but also because of how they share frames, resources, and tactics. They rely on flexible narratives that can be reshaped for different audiences.

Here at home, we watched these movements move from the margins to the mainstream. We see this strategy unfolding through political infiltration.

Al Jama-ah sits in the GNU while its representatives oppose queer rights and gender equality, normalising exclusion under the language of representation. The Freedom Front Plus and the African Christian Democratic Party have long resisted homosexuality and LGBTQIA+ equality, grounding their positions in conservative Biblical literalism.

We see it in policy capture. The Family Values white paper, quietly sitting in parliament, echoes the agenda of the international anti-gender movement. The Pan-African Family Values Conference held in Kenya, together with calls by Errol Naidoo’s Family Policy Institute to host an SA version, signals a coordinated regional effort to roll back hard-won rights under the banner of “African morality”.

We see faith weaponised. At pro-Palestine solidarity marches in Cape Town, groups like Pagad and the Muslim Judicial Council have been platformed despite their anti-queer positions.

We see professional authority abused. The so-called “Do No Harm” collective, made up of medical doctors, leverages its professional credibility to attack gender-affirming health care, misusing science to cloak transphobia.

These are not isolated incidents. They are elements of a deliberate strategy to infiltrate civil society, solidarity movements, faith spaces, and state institutions. Moral panic is the fuel. Policy debates and public opinion are the battlefield. Black lives, queer lives, migrant bodies, and women’s autonomy are the price.

Understanding this ecosystem is not an academic exercise for me. It is a matter of survival.