International Meeting for Peace
Community of St Egidio, Rome
October 26th to 28th 2025
Forum-Africa: Land of the Young Generation
The Most Revd Archbishop Thabo Makgoba
“An Unequal World: What Alternatives?”
Firstly, I want to say how much I appreciate the invitation to join you, and to thank and congratulate the Sant’Egidio Community for your ministry of birthing and nurturing peace in our world.
Kwame Nkrumah, an elder statesman of the first wave of liberation in Africa, wrote in the early 1960’s, “The resources are there, it is up to us to marshal them in the service of our people.”
His words encapsulate the dilemma which we face particularly acutely in South Africa, where the Gini Coefficient, the World Bank index which measures income inequality, shows that we have the world's biggest gap between the rich and the poor. And the way in which our society works is not addressing the crisis this causes, because typically the sons and daughters of the wealthy enjoy a good education and employment, while the sons and daughters of the poor are caught in a self-perpetuating spiral of inadequate education, too few jobs and debilitating poverty.
Sadly, we have allowed wealth to mirror our vanity rather than be a window of opportunity. As someone once said, Africa’s young people, our greatest natural resource, often stand at the gates of opportunity, invited to look in but never invited to participate.
While the problem may be seen at its worst in South Africa, we are by no means unique. Across Africa, the dreams of our liberators, from Nkrumah to Nelson Mandela, have not been realised; in the words of Langston Hughes's poem, our dreams have been deferred, and our multiple social pathologies have ballooned.
We ignore the youth cohort at our peril. We are the youngest continent, with more than 60% of our people under 25 years old. In sub-Saharan Africa about 70% of our people are under 30 years of age. Estimates are that by 2035 more young Africans will enter the workforce each year than the rest of the world combined, with no guarantee there will actually be jobs for them.
The figures are frightening. The stark reality is that our large African population already constitutes a demographic burden, as it is called, with that demographic facing high unemployment, a mismatch of skills to jobs, a reliance on informal work and exclusion from economic decision-making.
This is a lethal combination. There is an old African proverb that haunts me in all of this dysfunction, which says “The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down in order to feel its warmth.” This is a prospect we cannot afford even to contemplate. The young need to be embraced now with opportunity, with dignity and trust, and we must create equality of opportunity.
To marshal the resources of our countries in the service of our people, we need to break what economists call the “resource curse”, the paradox in which nations blessed with minerals, oil, and other commodities exploit them successfully but fail to spend the ensuing riches on development, meaning they remain poor in education, jobs and justice. As a theologian, I call this a “a failure of stewardship.” When wealth becomes concentrated, it stops being a blessing and becomes a form of bondage, holding back the young instead of setting them free. In Luke's Gospel (Lk: 12:48), Jesus says that from those who have been given much, much will be required. Africa has been given much, yet the question hangs over us: have we used the much to build up the next generation?
Our challenge is not only one for Africa; it is global. In 2016 I attended in Hong Kong an Ecumenical School on Governance, Economics and Management, where we looked at how we might distribute resources and income more equitably in a restructured global economy. My primary focus at the time was on the way in which the skewed allocation of resources affected the Global South. Now when we look at the Global North, it has become clear that we in the South are not the only victims of the current ordering of the global economy. We now realise that what Desmond Tutu used to call the “so-called ordinary people” – “so-called,” he said “because in my theology, nobody is ordinary, all are created in the image of God” – that average men and women in the world's most powerful and prosperous economies, are just as much as the victims of the greed of self-serving elites who wield economic and political power for their own benefit as the poor in the South.
The global financial crisis of 2008 gave us some warning of this, but it is especially since 2016 that the devastating consequences of inequality and the hoarding of power and resources for the benefit of a few have become apparent in economically developed nations as well. Populist oligarchies have risen to power in countries which we imagined were democracies – flawed democracies as they might have been, but democracies which aspired to reflect the views and the interests of all their people. Across the world, now including in Europe and the United States, we see the phenomenon of what we might call the “left-behinds” – those who stand on the margins, watching elites prospering while their standard of living is eroded. We see them turning toward political solutions reflecting economic chauvinism, xenophobic nationalism, woven in with resurgent racism and even the stirrings of a new kind of fascism. We see our faith perverted and transformed into a narrow Christian nationalism which seeks to demonize “the other”. Like a cancer, economic inequality is metastasising across the world.
As we look for alternatives, these developments create for us a new and critical challenge. We cannot only focus on fighting inequality within each developing country; we cannot only focus on how to fight inequality across the African continent; we cannot only focus on how to fight inequality between the developing and the industrialised worlds.
The devastating consequences of inequality within industrialised countries are already being seen in the drastic cuts in foreign aid and assistance to the developing world. We now need to operate within a new, holistic paradigm, which recognises that inequality within all nations, rich and poor, threatens the future of humankind.
Our crisis is not merely political or economic; it is spiritual. When wealth becomes detached from justice, it ceases to be a blessing and becomes a temptation. When power forgets compassion, it turns prosperity into oppression. Pope Francis spoke regularly about the economy that kills, an economy where profits are more important than people and where the young are treated as disposable.
The key questions we need to ask are not only for Africa, but for the world. How can our riches serve the common good? How can we ensure that the young inherit not debts and disillusionment but dignity and direction? We must transition from accumulation to allocation, from privilege to participation. This will not fall out of the sky, it has to be struggled for. We need to ensure that we use every pulpit and platform to instruct, to teach and to prioritise this quest for justice for the young. We need to educate for justice. We need to mobilise, call people out, demonstrate and initiate activism to grow awareness and signal our strength. We also have to act where there is leverage for change, in the places where decisions are made, where policy is considered and decided upon. This theory of change needs to be a part of our strategy to realise our dreams for the young, for a just economy and a world that deeply respects the other and repairs our planet.
Simply put, as people of faith – or at least as people of conscience who follow the Golden Rule – our calling is to reclaim the moral purpose of wealth, to put it back in service of the human purpose, and not the other way round.
God bless you. God bless Africa. God bless this community, and God bless the world.
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