Former Free State premier Ace Magashule’s personal assistant Moroadi Cholota returned to South Africa through a process the courts themselves have already declared unlawful. Yet this week, in a quiet Bloemfontein courtroom, a judge concluded that none of that matters— at least not enough to stop her trial.
In a judgment that is both clinically legal and quietly unsettling, the Free State High Court drew a sharp line between the state’s misconduct in bringing Cholota home and its right to prosecute her now that she is here. The result is a ruling that allows the criminal case against her to proceed. Even while accepting that the path that delivered her into the dock was irregular.
The logic is austere and almost philosophical. What happened on the journey does not invalidate what happens in court.
Up for multiple counts of fraud, graft
Cholota, once a personal assistant to former Free State premier Ace Magashule, faces multiple counts of fraud, corruption and money laundering. All charges are linked to a broader web of allegations surrounding the province’s controversial asbestos project.
Before any trial could begin, however, she raised a special plea. An argument that the court should not try her at all because of how she was extradited from the US.
Earlier proceedings had already found that her extradition was unlawful. The request had been driven not by the executive authority empowered to do so, but by prosecutors. It was a technical breach, but not a trivial one. In the architecture of international law, who asks for extradition matters?
Yet the Constitutional Court has already signalled that unlawfulness alone does not revoke jurisdiction. It sent the matter back to the Free State High Court to decide whether the remaining complaints about how the state secured her return were serious enough to halt the prosecution altogether.
Judge Phillip Loubser’s answer is now clear: they are not.
At the centre of Cholota’s argument was a simple claim. She said she was not charged because investigators had evidence against her but because she refused to implicate others. In her telling, the prosecution was less an act of justice than a form of leverage. An attempt to compel testimony against more senior figures.
Court shoots down her claims
The court did not accept this version. It preferred the testimony of investigators who said there was already evidence linking her to the alleged corruption before she declined to provide a statement. They told the court she moved from witness to suspect because of what they already knew. Not because of what she refused to say.
That distinction proved decisive. If the charges were grounded in evidence, then the prosecution could not be dismissed as retaliatory. If there was probable cause, then the case had a lawful foundation. This was regardless of the procedural irregularities that followed.
The judge leaned heavily on findings by American courts, which had reviewed the extradition request and concluded that sufficient evidence existed to justify it. The US, he reasoned, had not simply taken South Africa’s word. It had examined the material and made its own determination. That independent scrutiny became a form of validation. A second opinion that fortified the prosecution’s legitimacy.
Argument around extradition
Cholota also argued that South African authorities misrepresented her as a fugitive who had refused to return voluntarily. Here, the judgment becomes more ambivalent. Evidence suggested she had at one point indicated a willingness to come back. Yet the court concluded that this discrepancy was not decisive. The extradition, it said, turned primarily on probable cause, not on whether she had boarded a plane willingly.
There is a curious tension in this reasoning. The judgment acknowledges inaccuracies and irregularities. It even accepts that the extradition itself was unlawful — yet treats them as largely inconsequential once sufficient evidence of wrongdoing is established. It is as though the legal system has decided that the existence of a case outweighs the flaws in how the accused was brought before it.
This is not new doctrine. Courts have long held that jurisdiction does not evaporate merely because the state behaves improperly. But in Cholota’s case, the contrast is unusually stark. The same legal system that condemns the state’s conduct in one breath declines to attach meaningful consequence to it in the next.
The result is a judgment that feels both rigorous and incomplete. Rigorous in its careful parsing of evidence and procedure. Incomplete in its reluctance to grapple fully with what it means for a constitutional state to act unlawfully and still proceed as if nothing of substance has occurred.
Credibility of witnesses
There are other silences, too. The court accepted the credibility of state witnesses who denied misleading US authorities. And it relied on foreign court findings to bolster its confidence. Yet much of this validation originates within the same prosecutorial architecture whose conduct was already found wanting. The judgment does not dwell on this circularity. It simply moves forward.
In the end, the ruling is less about Cholota than about the resilience of the criminal process itself. It affirms that once an accused stands before a South African court, the machinery of prosecution is difficult to halt. Procedural breaches, even unlawful ones, must reach an extraordinarily high threshold before they derail a trial.
For Cholota, the immediate consequence is straightforward. She will stand trial.
For the justice system, the implications are more elusive. The judgment confirms that unlawful extradition does not confer immunity. But it also raises a quieter question: if the state can act unlawfully to bring someone home and still proceed largely unimpeded, what, in practical terms, is the cost of getting it wrong?
