NEWS FEATURE: Tutu’s Successor Calls for Ethics in World Economics

c. 2000 Religion News Service LOS ANGELES _ The Rev. Njongonkulu Ndungane, Anglican archbishop of Cape Town, South Africa, remembers watching his predecessor and Nobel laureate, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, rise to fame and thinking, “I pity the … person who succeeds Desmond.” But Ndungane was chosen to fill those shoes in 1996. In the years […]

c. 2000 Religion News Service

LOS ANGELES _ The Rev. Njongonkulu Ndungane, Anglican archbishop of Cape Town, South Africa, remembers watching his predecessor and Nobel laureate, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, rise to fame and thinking, “I pity the … person who succeeds Desmond.”

But Ndungane was chosen to fill those shoes in 1996. In the years since, he has begun forging his own identity as a crusader for the poor even as the times and the message might differ.


“God raises people for various ministries at various times … and he equips those people for that ministry,” he said in an interview during a recent appearance in Los Angeles where he underscored some of the issues that have launched him onto the world stage.

While Tutu’s foe was the monolithic injustice of South African apartheid, he himself faces a different task _ lobbying for a restructured global economy that will serve the poor, Ndungane said. “Building up is actually a tremendous challenge.”

In a speech to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council, Ndungane stressed the need for debt relief for the world’s poorest countries.

In his talk, titled “A New Humanity for a New Age: Moral and Ethical Imperatives in a Globalizing World,” Ndungane targeted concerns with present economic trends before urging a system where profit-taking is tempered by fundamental human respect.

“The law of profit alone … cannot put food in the bellies of the millions … who hunger and starve on the African continent, in Latin America and in Asia,” he said. “The law of profit alone will not allow them the drugs they need to treat the most stressful and appalling diseases known to humanity.”

Charging the economically privileged with setting the agenda for globalization at the expense of the poor, Ndungane said, “The powerful wealthy are establishing … the character, priorities and values of the emerging world order.”

He said he fear the less developed nations are little more than suppliers for the factories of the developed ones. “For the wealthy, continents such as Africa remain the source of oil and scarce, non-renewable resources,” he said. “In the new age, the poor face the danger of designation to perpetual irrelevance.”


In particular, Ndungane said he supports Jubilee 2000, the broadly ecumenical international movement urging the world’s creditor nations to forgive the debt of poor nations as an echo of the biblical Jubilee’s periodic re-allocation of property and release of slaves in ancient Israel.

“Every 50 years, the Jubilee year,” Ndungane told the Los Angeles audience, “we should right the wrongs that have been woven over the period into just and equitable economic relationships, relationships between developed and developing countries.”

Interviewed before the speech, the archbishop said, “People who are in poverty … should not be put perpetually in that position.” While individuals within nations can shed debt by declaring bankruptcy, Ndungane said, no such legal mechanism exists at the international level.

“The IMF (International Monetary Fund) and the World Bank, they become judge, jury and plaintiff … at the same time because they deal with interests of the creditors,” he said.

“Debt will stay with us like sin,” Ndungane added. “But we need to have ways of managing that.”

He said Anglican bishops have discussed proposing a “mediation council” to establish guidelines under the United Nations for avoiding unbearable burdens of debt.


But rather than merely detailing the current fight for debt relief, Ndungane used his speech to urge basic economic rethinking. “We need a fundamental reappraisal of economics so that need and capacity, rather than supply and demand, provide our guidelines,” he said.

He said he longs for a system in which financial gain would depend not on raw market forces but on valuing human beings, including those at the bottom of the economic ladder.

Such a system, he said, must spring from “morally responsible people.” Following the speech Ndungane referred to a groundswell of support for the Jubilee 2000 campaign. He said the movement delivered 17 million signatures from concerned people across the world to a G8 economic summit in Cologne, Germany, last year.

According to Los Angeles Episcopal Bishop Frederick Borsch, Ndungane “is very important in the Anglican communion” worldwide because of South Africa’s historic struggle against apartheid and the prominence that struggle has given the church.

“The fact the church there is a strong voice allows … the rest of us to be able to associate with him in a way that we can speak out on a number of other important issues.”

DEA END PARKS

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