Ah, Chief Dwasaho! As I write this letter, cutting short my holiday, I scan the wires and wait for a media statement from Pretoria following the confirmed illegal rendition of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro by United States military forces. This act has drawn global scrutiny and divided world opinion. None arrives. No condemnation from the head of state. No measured outrage from the office of the presidency. No assertion of principle on behalf of the Republic.

Instead, the Department of International Relations and Cooperation, through its spokesperson, issues a release urging the United Nations Security Council to address what Pretoria considers a unilateral military action in Venezuela that violates the United Nations Charter and undermines the territorial integrity and political independence of a sovereign state.

It is concerning that this position is articulated by a department spokesperson rather than directly by the Head of State. In circumstances of such gravity, leadership would ordinarily be expected at the highest level.

The unprecedented political action by a self-appointed police in chief of world affairs, the senile His Excellency Mr Tariffs Donald Trump, sitting President of the United States, is an aberration. It is the familiar grammar of a power that never disguises its interests when oil and minerals are plentiful. We know this grammar well. It arrives before civility, before law, before even the pretence of respect.

Here, nouns are never innocent. Oil is not a substance but a sentence. Minerals are not elements but motives. Democracy becomes conditional, valid only if it aligns with the main statement issued in Washington. Sovereignty is reduced to an adjective, decorative, removable, subject to editing. The verb does all the work. To sanction. To seize. To abduct. To render. Action words are deployed with confidence, while responsibility is hidden in the passive voice. No subject ever appears to claim the act.

And then there are the adjectives, carefully chosen, faithfully repeated. Rogue. Illegitimate. Authoritarian. These words soften the ground before the invasion of the verb. They prepare the ear, lower resistance, and make the unthinkable sound grammatically plausible.

Meanwhile, the Empire reserves the most flattering descriptors for itself. Rules-based. Law-abiding. Democratic. These are not descriptions but permissions, licences to act without consequence. In this syntax, power is always the subject, violence the predicate, and justice a footnote, added later, if at all.

If the United States were a moral authority, it would have intervened in South Africa between 1948 and 1993, when apartheid criminalised Black existence and state violence was not covert but openly legislated. It did not. Instead, it sponsored fictitious opposition to liberation movements across Africa. Freedom fighters were treated as criminals, not because they were unjust, but because they threatened an economic and political order favourable to the Empire.

This is the snapshot of Washington “justice.” It is not anchored in principle but in proximity to power, minerals and oil reserves. As I argued elsewhere, global politics is increasingly shaped by big men with big wallets, whose lies are not accidental but structural. And whose egos are protected by systems that reward excess rather than restraint. Accountability is not absent through oversight. It is selective by design. Those who serve the Capital are indulged, rehabilitated, or discreetly shielded. Those who obstruct the flow of wealth are suddenly deemed criminals. Justice, in this formulation, is not blind. It is transactional, money-oriented, and obedient to colonial influence.

What this exposes, with uncomfortable clarity, is that moral language has become performance rather than standard. Words such as democracy, rule of law, and international norms are not deployed to restrain power but to launder it. They arrive after the fact, once decisions have already been taken, interests secured, and damage done. This is why Washington justice feels so familiar to those on the receiving end. It is not law acting on power, but power borrowing the costume of law. Impunity is mistaken for leadership, and the loudest sermons are delivered by those least willing to submit themselves to the rules they claim to enforce.

As I wrote here, “big men with big wallets” thrive in a global order that rewards excess, indulgence and impunity, while punishing restraint, principle and dissent. That was not a rhetorical flourish. It was a terminal diagnosis. Washington justice functions correctly. It functions exactly as intended, protecting those who serve Big Capital and disciplining those who resist it. People are expandable.

My leader, this is why the archive matters. Patrice Lumumba was eliminated after being identified as an obstacle to Western control of Congolese resources, with the CIA, the American spy agency, later acknowledged as complicit.

Salvador Allende, the democratically elected President of Chile, was not removed by chance, but destabilised through a sustained CIA-backed campaign that made his violent overthrow possible.

Mohammad Mossadegh was overthrown for asserting control over Iranian oil, replaced not by democracy but by dictatorship, with consequences that still reverberate, underwritten by the US and Britain. 

These were not aberrations. They were the Official Policy of the Empire. The global order is not collapsing because of widespread corruption in democracy; it is collapsing because corruption has been normalised at the highest levels of Colonial Power. Leaders who insisted that sovereignty meant ownership rather than permission were marked for removal. Their deaths, disposals, or disappearances were later dressed up as unfortunate necessities in the language of freedom.

This is the architecture of Empire.

Greed first.

Law later.

Truth, if it survives at all, arrives last.

Let us be clear about history. Nelson Mandela was arrested with the assistance of the CIA and held in prison for 27 years. That fact alone should permanently disqualify lectures about democracy delivered from Washington to the rest of the world. As subjects of the Empire, we do not encounter so-called US justice as theory. We experience it as practice, as disruption, as punishment.

The Empire, Mr President, has never been loyal to truth or democracy. It has been loyal to oil and minerals, to plunder, to colonial theft, to the old belief that some lives exist merely to be managed, disciplined, or removed when inconvenient.

This is not a correspondence asking for reform.

It is a letter calling for rupture.

Not rapture. Not prayer. Not wishful thinking. Rupture. A clean break. A snapping of the thread that has kept us pretending that international law still restrains colonial power, that allegations are neutral, and that Empire still bothers to knock before it kicks the door down.

This is the lie that must be ruptured.

The pattern is now too familiar to feign surprise. First allegations. Media repetition next, stripped of doubt and context. Then sanctions. US strikes. Special forces. Renditions. Legal language arrives, mopping up the blood with words like accountability, stability, and international norms, only in PowerPoints.

Law does not precede power here. Law follows it, limping, embarrassed, rewriting itself to fit the deed.

My leader, there is no way sovereignty must become conditional. Elections cannot matter only when they flatter the Empire. No political leader must become a nobody because he(she) makes Washington uncomfortable.

This is not about whether one agrees with Nicolás Maduro, Haitian leader Jean‑Bertrand Aristide, or Panamanian President Manuel Noriega. That is the cheap distraction. This is about whether we accept a world in which one state appoints itself prosecutor, judge, and jailer of other people’s democracies.

Rupture, then, is a refusal.

A refusal to accept unilateral indictments as moral truth.

A refusal to treat foreign abduction as law enforcement.

A refusal to let allegations replace evidence, and power replace process.

A rupture occurs when the language stops cooperating. When we stop calling these acts “operations” and start calling them what they are: violations dressed in legal costume. It is when we say, plainly, that if international law cannot bind the powerful, it is not law at all, merely theatre.

Mr President, this is the moment when the spell must break. Not later. Not after another precedent is set. Not after another elected leader is bundled onto an American plane. Now.

Because when propaganda suffices, and law is optional, power has already won.

We are rehearsing our own disposability.

My leader, if I shed readers, so be it. Journalism is not a popularity contest, nor a customer service desk. It is an encounter with the record, written in real time, for those not yet born who will ask what was known, who spoke, and who stayed silent. When journalism trims its language to please, it does not soften the truth; it distorts it and falsifies the archive. To speak truth to power is to accept consequence, not negotiate comfort. This marks the beginning of my 2026 mission, codenamed Operation Thunderstorm, to pursue the truth, nothing but the truth, whatever the cost. Let’s engage further here @ Letter to Mahlamba Ndlopfu | Official Page | Facebook.

Till whenever, my man. Send me NOWHERE near the Empire.

Written by Bhekisisa Mncube, winner of the 2024 Standard Bank Sikuvile Journalism Award in the column/editorial category, and winner of the 2020 Vodacom Journalist of the Year Award.