Allan Boesak

The causes of poverty can be traced to deliberate decisions and deliberate economic and political policies designed to benefit the rich and powerful.

Allan Aubrey Boesak (born 23 February 1946) is a South African Dutch Reformed Church cleric and politician and anti-apartheid activist. He was sentenced to prison for fraud in 1999 but was subsequently granted an official pardon and reinstated as a cleric in 2004.

Quotes

Comfort and Protest (1987)

• There are clear and predictable consequences for the world if human beings continue to rape the earth and plunder its resources; to exploit, oppress, and dominate the weak and the poor for the sake of greed and the hunger for power; to depend on ever-rising levels of violence and ever more lethal instruments of death and destruction in order to secure positions of power and privilege.
  • pp. 65-66

• Injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere. As long as one person suffers unjustly, the whole world suffers. The existence of injustice, violence, and exploitation contaminates and diminishes the whole human community.
  • p. 66

• There are wars in this world, not because wars are the will of God but because of greed and arrogance, the lust for power and domination. There is hunger not merely because there is lack of food, but because of political and economic policies that foster inequality of the distribution of resources, because of one-sided control of world markets by powerful nations who refuse to enter seriously in the search for a more just, equitable, and sustainable economic order.
  • p. 67

• There was a time when people of the rich nations of the world regarded poverty as a "natural condition" for those living in the poor nations of the world. ... Today we have largely been stripped of this pseudo-innocence. We know that the poor are so poor because the rich are so rich, that the causes of poverty can be traced to deliberate decisions and deliberate economic and political policies designed to benefit the rich and powerful. We know that poverty and unemployment are not just accidents of history but deliberate, even indispensable, components of capitalism as an economic system.
  • p. 67

• God speaks, but always in the voice of the voiceless, the defenceless, the powerless. If the powerful do not hear God in this way, they will not hear God at all.
  • p. 71