The Church Club of New York
Gala Dinner, New York City
May 1st 2025
Remarks by the Most Revd Thabo Makgoba
Archbishop of Cape Town and Metropolitan of the Anglican Church of Southern Africa
A very good evening to you all, and thank you for your warm welcome. Thank you, the President, Vice-Presidents, the Director, and all members of the Board of Trustees for your generous invitation to me to speak to your members and guests. It’s a great honour.
I had hoped to deliver a more general address tonight on our South African experiences of reconciliation and healing, but these are urgent, even desperate times, for Africa, and especially for our relations with the United States, and this year, 2025, could go down as a historical watershed in our partnerships, certainly at government level. I hope you will bear with me as I sketch the concerns of faith leaders in our and other African countries at this time.
A decade ago, addressing the Anglican Church of Southern Africa’s Provincial Synod, I spoke of my concern at the fact that although South Africa has achieved political liberation, we have failed to secure our economic liberation. Inherited patterns of privilege and wealth, overwhelmingly associated with one racial group, have created an economy which spits in the face of Gospel values, and we have failed to make sufficient progress in overcoming the legacy of the past. Judged by the Gini coefficient, the method most commonly used by economists to measure income inequality, we are one of the most unequal societies in the world.
My plea to the church was that we should join the global ecumenical debate which is taking place at present, seeking to model an alternative to the current system of governing financial systems, one that is less exploitative and would distribute resources and income more equitably. I wanted us to explore a theology and ecclesiology of generosity—focussing on the Incarnation as hermeneutical conversation of theology and economy, developing if you like a social teaching on the economy.
My primary focus was on the economies of the Global South and especially those in my own church Province of Southern Africa—where we have dioceses in the nations of Lesotho, Namibia, Eswatini and the island of St Helena as well as in South Africa. But now, when I look back on what I said to the Synod, and see what is happening in the Global North, it has been almost with a sense of shock that I realise 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, just as much as people in the Global South, are the victims of self-serving elites who wield economic and political power for their own benefit.
Across the world it appears that we are seeing 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 those people turning toward solutions reflecting economic chauvinism, xenophobic political 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”, and whose adherents struggle to accept the teachings of Jesus concerning “turning the other cheek”. And in an age-old pattern, elites – through their dominance of the media and public debate – exploit divisions and divert people's anger so that it targets not those responsible for inequality and injustice, but the vulnerable, the poor and the weak; those even less fortunate than they.
Like a cancer, economic inequality is metastasizing across the world, eating away at our social compacts, threatening to devour our very being, everything that which makes us human. We face, I believe, a kairos moment for humanity.
So if we are facing a kairos moment, how are we as Christians to respond? I would normally hesitate to comment on the affairs of another country, but in this instance I am making an exception, since the person involved was born and spent many of his formative years in apartheid South Africa. I was distressed to read recently the transcript of an interview given by the billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk to the podcaster Joe Rogan. In the interview, Mr. Musk said, and I quote: “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” While he also said he believes that “empathy is good,” he went on to describe it as “a bug in Western civilization” which is, in his words, being “weaponized”.
Compare those words with those of Pope Francis, in his recent letter to the American Catholic Church on the question of migration. “The true common good,” he wrote, “is promoted when society and government, with creativity and strict respect for the rights of all—as I have affirmed on numerous occasions—welcomes, protects and integrates the most fragile, unprotected and vulnerable." Compare the words of Mr. Musk also with those of another South African, the bishop who accepted me for ordination training, namely Desmond Tutu: “The first law of our being,” Archbishop Tutu said, “is that we are set in a delicate network of interdependence with our fellow human beings and with the rest of God’s creation. We are meant to live as sisters and brothers, as members of one family, the human family, God’s family. We are created for peace, for harmony, for togetherness. All kinds of things go horribly, badly wrong when we flout that fundamental law..." [Ends quote]
Our experience in South Africa—the experience of those who have lived in South Africa all their lives, of those who stayed and fought apartheid even when they could have left—is the reverse of a philosophy which fears empathy, and is suspicious of those who show it. What held us together under apartheid; what has held us together in the most turbulent years of three decades of democracy; and what enables societies to flourish economically is in fact empathy. For what is the purpose of economic activity? Each one of us lives in relationship with others, so our economic activity is worthless unless it is about ensuring human flourishing, the flourishing of all, which can be achieved only by working for the common good. As Pope Francis also said in his recent letter: “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups... The human person is a subject with dignity who, through the constitutive relationship with all, especially with the poorest, can gradually mature in his identity and vocation.”
Accepting those views as being at the heart of our mission as Christians, I want to appeal to you tonight for your intervention with your public representatives to save two government programmes which have constituted the most remarkable examples in our generation of American empathy and compassion for the poor and vulnerable of Africa. One, which goes by the acronym PEPFAR, concerns aid, and the other, called AGOA, concerns trade.
PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, is an initiative of the George W. Bush administration, which since the programme was launched in 2003 has saved the lives of 26 million people across the world. Moreover, it has enabled 7.8 million babies to be born without being infected with HIV, and it has saved 8.3 million children from being orphaned.
To quote Charles Kenny of the Centre for Global Development in Washington DC, whose board is chaired by the former Treasury Secretary, Lawrence Summers: “Every day around the world a quarter of a million people pick up antiretroviral prescriptions thanks to the program. PEPFAR can take a considerable portion of the credit for the fact that global AIDS deaths have halved since its creation... New infections worldwide each year are at about a quarter of their peak. It is miraculous progress...” And, the writer adds: “Progress extends beyond HIV: the President’s Malaria Initiative is helping to turn the tide against what may be history’s greatest killer, with global malaria incidence rates down by about a quarter since 2000.”
Last year Congress re-authorised PEPFAR for another year, until March 25 this year, and as of now it is unclear whether it will be continued, and if so what its budget will be. In a presentation prepared for members of Congress, Professor Lucie Cluver of Oxford University and her colleagues warn that if PEPFAR is terminated, then between now and and the year 2030, 19.2 million adults and children will lose support for HIV treatment and 680,000 mothers will lose the services they need to prevent their babies being HIV-infected at birth. They estimate that another 13.4 million people, including nearly half a million babies and children younger than 15, will die of AIDS, and 2.8 million children will become orphans because their parents will die of AIDS.
Addressing faith-based groups in a recent seminar, they say there’s an urgent need to reauthorize PEPFAR for five years, with 10 percent of the funds earmarked for orphans and vulnerable children. And with more than 10 million girls already reached with programmes protecting them from sexual abuse, trafficking and exploitation, another 22 million can be reached if PEPFAR is reauthorized.
One of the issues raised by congressional staffers is the over-reliance on donor funding of some countries which receive aid. That is a legitimate concern, and as faith-based organizations we recognise that co-financing involving both domestic sources of funds in recipient nations and external donor funds is essential to long-term sustainability. Many governments, especially in countries which have received PEPFAR funding, have already stepped up domestic funding substantially, but we still need coordinated advocacy to push for further commitments.
Eighteen months ago, when Congress was considering what turned out to be the one-year reauthorization of PEPFAR, former President Bush wrote in the Washington Post: “To abandon our commitment now would forfeit two decades of unimaginable progress and raise further questions about the worth of America’s word.” His words have a new urgency in 2025.
The other programme, AGOA, is the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act, which offers African countries which qualify for its benefits duty-free access to the U.S. market for more than 1,800 products. It is set to expire in September this year, and given your President’s views on tariffs, most trade experts are pessimistic about its chances of being renewed.
Crucially, AGOA is based on the principle that trade is better than aid, and to qualify for it, African governments must be committed to a market-based economy, the rule of law, political pluralism, and the right to due process. They also have to eliminate barriers to U.S. trade and investment, enact policies to reduce poverty, combat corruption, and protect human rights.
In the view of Daniel Runde, a senior vice-president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, and I quote, “If the AGOA ship sinks, so will the U.S. relationship with Africa.” He says that since its enactment in 2000, AGOA has transformed the relationship from one that is primarily aid-based to a mutually beneficial business partnership. He adds: “Fingers are pointing every which way for what will prove to be an economic and geopolitical catastrophe for the United States should AGOA lapse.”
Whatever the effects of President Trump’s new tariffs on the rest of the world, they don’t seem to make sense for Africa. Take Lesotho, for example, whose diocese is part of the Anglican Church of Southern Africa.
The now-temporarily suspended “reciprocal tariff” on imports from Lesotho has been set at the extraordinary level of 50 percent. That’s not because Lesotho charges a high tariff on imports from the U.S.—it levies only 7.5 percent. President Trump’s figure is based on the trade imbalance between the two countries—the fact that Lesotho doesn’t buy as much from you as you buy from them. In 2024, Lesotho’s imports from the U.S. were valued at $2.8 million, while your imports from Lesotho were worth $237.3 million—ironically, a consequence of AGOA, which has enabled Lesotho to develop a vibrant clothing industry, for example making jeans for Levi’s and Wranglers.
The only way Lesotho could escape the reciprocal tariff would be if they imported goods from the U.S. equal to the value of their exports to you. This would be impossible, Lesotho being a nation of only two million people, and one which is classified as one of the world's 44 “least developed countries”. And Lesotho is of course not the only African country which might be hit with the reciprocal tariffs; 20 African nations are affected, 11 of them facing tariffs of more than 20 percent.
Neither the reciprocal tariffs, nor ending AGOA would appear to be of much benefit to the United States. Instead, members of your Congress could re-examine other ways of pursuing what the State Department's new Senior Advisor for Africa, Massad Boulos, said after a trip to central Africa last month. On his return to Washington, he declared that President Trump’s approach to Africa was to pursue the U.S.’s security interests while strengthening economic relationships with the people and nations of Africa “through greater trade and investment.”
Forgive me for addressing you on such prosaic matters, but the lives and livelihoods of millions of our sisters and brothers are at stake. And there is a measure of self-interest for your children and grandchildren in this; Africa now has a population of more than one billion, and unlike some other regions of the world, its population continues to grow and will become ever more important markets in the future.
Let me end on a note of hope. Within the continent, despite the many challenges we face, there is a great deal of hope for the future of Africa. But as Christians, the promise of hope goes beyond mere optimism. Christian hope, the hope offered by the Easter story, the Resurrection of our Lord, is not a nebulous, pie-in-the-sky concept. It is rather the driving force which motivates our determination to name our problems, to identify solutions to them and to mobilise people to overcome them. The Resurrection, the new life of Easter, means turning history round, opening spaces for healing, restoring trust, growing in compassion and empathy, and therefore building a world in which equal opportunity, justice and equity flourish.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu once said: “Easter says to us that despite everything to the contrary, God’s will for us will prevail. Love will prevail over hate, justice over injustice and oppression, peace over exploitation and bitterness.” His words offer us the reassurance this Eastertide that we can and will build a better Africa, a better United States of American, and a better world. As followers of Christ, of that we can be certain.
I end by adapting the Prayer for Africa, with which we end services of worship across Southern Africa:
God bless Africa,
God bless the United States,
Guard their children,
Guide their leaders,
And give them and the world your peace.
Amen.
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