Address to an International Consultation on the Economy of Peace

 NIFEA Consultation on Economy of Peace
26-28 August 2026, Panama City
The Most Revd Dr Thabo Makgoba
Panel 3: Economic Pathways to Peace
Thursday August 27

Distinguished fellow panellists,
Friends:

Thank you for asking me to speak here today on a question which—it is no exaggeration to say—is critical to the survival of humankind. It is a special challenge for me, and a humbling one, to bring to you a perspective from a continent whose population has more than doubled since the late 20th century, a population which now totals one-and-a-half billion people and which is projected to reach nearly four billion by the end of this century.1 
    Since attending the first Ecumenical School on Governance, Economics and Management which many of you convened in Hong Kong in 2016, the questions which are the subject of this consultation have been close to my heart. I brought to Hong Kong my South African experience of what I call at home the “old struggle” and the “new struggle”. The old struggle was of course the struggle waged in the second half of the 20th century against apartheid, a largely peaceful struggle which succeeded in its objective of bringing about our political liberation. The new struggle is the struggle we still face in South Africa, which is a struggle to bring about economic liberation, a struggle which involves fighting against corruption, greed and self-dealing among the elite of our society. Most importantly, and of particular relevance to our discussions this week—it is a struggle against inequality. For according to the Gini coefficient, which measures the gap between the rich and the poor in a country, South Africa suffers the worst inequality on the face of the earth.
    Since Hong Kong, it has became clear that the crisis we face affects everyone across the planet. As I said in a presentation in Rome last year, the consequences of inequality and the concentration of power and resources by a few for their own benefit have become apparent not just to the Global South but to economically developed nations as well. We are seeing across the world—now including Europe and the United States—the phenomenon of large numbers of God’s people standing on the margins of society, looking on to see elites prosper while their standard of living is eroded. Alarmingly, we see many of those people in the Global North turning toward solutions reflecting economic chauvinism, xenophobic political nationalism, woven in with resurgent racism and even the stirrings of a new kind of fascism.
    “Like a cancer, economic inequality is metastasising across the world. And we see the rise to power of oligarchs 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. These phenomena eat away at our social compacts, threatening to devour our very being, everything that makes us human. We face... a kairos moment for humanity.”2
    The implications of this for what we are discussing this week are game-changing. Half a century ago, we in the Global South were appealing to churches in the north to work alongside developing countries in our interests. Now we need to frame our task more broadly. To those in the Global North, we now say, the struggle that we face is a common one, and in challenging the citizens of your nations, you are challenging them to take up this struggle in their own self-interest as well as ours.
    But, that said, how do we, in the words framing this panel’s task, “mobilise moral voice, financial influence, and grassroots action to reimagine economic systems in service of life, justice, and enduring peace”?
    I want to give a three-fold answer to the question. 
    Firstly, there are initiatives on the ground which we can take, to which many of you can speak with more experience and more eloquently than I. To take examples from Southern Africa, I am thinking of initiatives such as large faith communities mobilising money and resources to a common end, such as churches working with financial institutions to provide services for their members, services which should be provided at discounted rates to facilitate economic progress. Or those in which women work together to mobilise money through South Africa's stokvels. Or food-growing initiatives deploying “God's way of farming”, environmentally and ecologically responsible and opposing the commercialisation of seed provision for corporate profit. Such initiatives will of course depend on the specific conditions which are relevant to each of your own contexts. 
    Secondly, there is public advocacy, whether on our own as churches or in large campaigns with other civil society and political forces. Here, I am thinking of the need to stop the scandal of transfer pricing by multinational corporations—the immoral trickery by which they shift profits earned in one country, nearly always a relatively poor country, and declare those profits in a tax haven with a lower tax rate, thus denying revenue to the government of the country in which the profits were earned.3
    In South Africa, when politically connected individuals shocked the nation during Covid by cashing in on the acquistion of personal protective equipment, I issued angry statements calling out the corruption for what it was, and then challenged global pharmaceutical companies to provide parity in access to vaccines. Post-Hong Kong, I joined an initiative arising from the massacre of striking miners to hold “Courageous Conversations”, involving all parties in the mining industry in a drive to reform mining practices and compensate the families of the victims; an initiative which has now developed into a global peacebuilding centre for business.
    But there is a third element which is quite crucial to mobilising, and that is strengthening our capacity to stay in the struggle for the long haul, and to commit to doing this no matter how daunting the odds we face may seem. I was selected for ordination training by the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and the example of prayer and action which he modelled has always given me inspiration. In the darkest days of our struggle against apartheid, when we faced the most powerful military force in Africa, he never lost his conviction that, in the end, even if we were not alive to see it, the ideals for which we fought would prevail. He never lost hope, even when, as he colourfully said, he was clinging onto it by “the skin of his teeth”; even when, as he also joked, he would pray to God, “We know that in the end victory will be ours, but please God, can’t you make it a bit more obvious?”
    Nowadays in South Africa, when the inevitably of eventually winning our struggle against corruption and greed seems less clear, we draw inspiration from Jürgen Moltmann’s Theology of Hope. Unpacking this, Professor Jacobus Vorster of the University of the North-West, suggests that hope as a process is built on the often small signs of what he describes as “the living, moving God”, working through small acts that are the witnesses of God’s Kingdom, acts to which each of us, no matter how modest our power, can consciously give expression in our daily lives. Summing up his thesis, he has written that “To find hope... is to see and testify about the moving God who continuously grinds out of the hard rocks of evil the visible and touchable signs of goodness that can serve as the solid foundation of hope.”4
    Globally, across the world, we are all engaged in what will be a long, hard and demanding struggle. To survive that struggle, to overcome the setbacks we will face, and to incrementally make the gains, step by step, which are necessary towards winning it, we will need resilience, and resilience is one of the contributions that we as people of faith can bring to the struggle.
    At its most basic, we do this simply by turning up and being there alongside the poor and the marginalised, allowing them to set the agenda and standing or marching with them. Let me give you some concrete examples. During the final stages of our struggle for democracy in South Africa, when our communities were torn by intra-communal violence fostered by the crumbling apartheid security structure, as church leaders we used to visit communities which were literally at war with one another. One of the church leaders once expressed deep frustration after arriving at the scene of yet another massacre, in despair that we hadn’t stopped it from happening. Desmond Tutu turned to him and said, yes, it is frustrating that we couldn’t stop it, yes it is frustrating that we arrive after it has happened, but our ministry now is simply to be with the people, to walk alongside them, and to wipe their tears. This from a person who had also inspired and led some of the biggest marches which had directly challenged the apartheid regime, eventually forcing the release of Nelson Mandela and negotiations for democracy.
    The challenges we have faced in a democratic South Africa are very different. But the importance of being alongside the people, the poor and the oppressed, has remained the same. Thus, when communities sprang up in the bush outside Cape Town, without proper sanitation, and their people were campaigning and demanding decent toilets from municipalities, we would stage what I called “Walks of Witness” through those areas, taking the media with us to advertise the people’s plight and put pressure on elected officials. On other occasions we joined civil society activists and academics in travelling to rural areas to highlight the lack of proper sanitation in their schools. Similarly, when it became clear that the fourth democratically-elected president of our country was allowing corruption to flourish, robbing especially the poor of resources to improve their lives, we would hold what we called “Processions of Witness”, in effect large protest marches, to Parliament. 
    Not only did that put pressure on the government, but for people to see respected religious leaders campaigning alongside them, people we would call “influencers” in the language of social media, stiffened their resolve and helped give them resilience and hope.
    Beyond South Africa, with a similar objective we have travelled to Ukraine and Palestine to walk alongside the people in their struggles there, and to highlight their plight. For us, such action reflects a determination, arising out of our theological convictions, to speak, to write, to press for courageous conversations with all parties and to act to help bring about peace and a more equitable economic framework in which all God's people can enjoy the abundant life Jesus promises us in John's Gospel.
    Let me end with a word on prayer. As people of faith, contemplation and action aren’t an either/or choice. It is drawing on our spiritual resources which give us, uniquely, the resilience and the power we need to overcome adversity and setbacks and to keep up the fight. Hours and hours of prayer each day were at the centre of Desmond Tutu’s life, and he used to say true prayer would not allow you to luxuriate in never-ending contemplation: it would drive you off your knees and out into the world to work for the common good of all God’s children.
    So let us go out into the world in the power of the Holy Spirit and testify to the work of the living, moving God who continuously grinds out of the hard rocks of evil the visible and touchable signs of goodness. Amen.

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