Archbishop Thabo Makgoba

An address to a group from the Brazilian organisation, Legado, which seeks to equip next-generation business leaders globally to navigate 21st-century socio-economic complexities, corporate civic responsibility, and wealth stewardship: 

Engaging the LEGADO Delegation

Remarks by Archbishop Thabo Makgoba

October 15th 2026

You come to us as heirs, and the word that brings you here is legacy. I want to suggest that legacy is not only something we inherit. It is something we build through our own continuing efforts, and it is something we owe to our community and our world. What has been placed in our hands is held in trust for others, and the measure of a legacy is not what we receive but what we hand on.

So let me begin not with economics but with Ubuntu. You speak of a Human Dignity Economy, and that is language which we can identify with immediately. But dignity is not one a tangible thing, one which sits alongside urban development and transition minerals. Whether human dignity is respected in the production of goods and services is the test of every economy. A person is a person through other persons. So too is a company, and so too is a family fortune. No wealth stands alone; it was made through the labour, the land and the lives of others.

 

In South Africa, I often speak of the New Struggle. The first struggle won us political freedom. The New Struggle is for economic justice, for ethical leadership and for integrity in public and private life. It is a struggle against inequality, against joblessness, against corruption and against the xenophobia that turns the poor against one another. Every one of us must ask on which side of that struggle we stand, and I would ask you, gently, on which side your family capital stands.

The churches of the world have not been silent on this. The World Council of Churches, the Lutheran World Federation, the Methodists, the Council for World Mission and the USPG, the mission society called the United Society Partners in the Gospel, have spoken together in calling for a new international financial architecture: one in which finance serves life rather than rules over it.

That means tax justice and an end to transfer pricing and the illicit financial flows that drain Africa of far more than she receives in aid. It means relief from the debts that bind the Global South. It means fair taxes on great wealth and on carbon, as the Zacchaeus Tax campaign has proposed. And the biblical Zacchaeus is surely the right text for heirs. Here was a rich man who chose restitution, gave back to society what he had taken, and more, and in doing so found salvation came to his house.

You have named transition minerals as one of Africa’s growth areas, and rightly so. But Africa has seen this film before. Gold, platinum and diamonds have left too many communities poorer than they found them, and the massacre of mine-workers in Marikana in our North-West Province in 2012 remains an open wound in our national life.

A just transition must not repeat the old policies and practice of extraction under a green banner. It must mean that communities share in ownership, that workers are paid fairly and kept safe, and that the land is healed rather than abandoned.

South Africa has real successes to share with the Global South. We have a Constitution that is among the finest in the world, we have the example of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and we have courts and a civil society that stood firm through the years when our state was captured by corruption.

But I must also be honest. We remain among the most unequal nations on earth, and resilience is not the same as justice. I suspect that Brazil, too, will recognise itself in that truth.

You ask me about stepping into the shoes of Archbishop Desmond Tutu. I have never tried to fill them; I have only tried to walk faithfully in my own. What I learned from him is that speaking truth to power includes speaking truth to your friends and to those you helped bring to power. If I have added anything of my own, it is the call to courageous conversations: dialogue between those of like mind, and those not of like mind, dialogue that stays at the table when it becomes hard, because that is where change is born.

And so to you, the next generation of stewards, I would offer three simple tests of civic courage. First, treat your privilege as a debt and not an entitlement. Second, pay your taxes where you earn your income, and pay those who work for you a living wage. Third, put patient capital into the places and people that others avoid.

Beyond these lie the new frontiers of struggle: artificial intelligence and the future of work, the climate debt owed to those who did least to cause the crisis, and the defence of truth in a polarised age.

Finally, let me leave you with a question to carry home: In fifty years’ time, what will your grandchildren thank you for giving away?

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