Daily Inspiration Quote by Desmond Tutu

Tutu strips away the comforting story foreign capital likes to tell about itself: that investment is benevolence, a kind of development aid with a profit margin. His first move is a moral ambush. By saying investors “should not think they are doing us a favor,” he punctures the savior narrative that lets corporations and governments feel generous while extracting value. It’s not just critique; it’s a demand that power speak honestly about its motives.

The phrase “cheap and abundant labor” is doing hard work. It’s economic language used like an indictment, exposing how apartheid didn’t merely segregate bodies but engineered a labor market: plentiful, controlled, and priced below dignity. Tutu’s subtext is that “abundance” here is manufactured by law, violence, and deprivation. If the labor is cheap, it’s because someone made Black South Africans expensive to house, educate, protect, and politically empower.

Then comes the word that turns a business decision into complicity: “buttressing.” Investors aren’t passive observers operating in a neutral marketplace; they’re structural supports. Money doesn’t just flow into factories and mines; it flows into the police, the pass laws, the courts that enforce property and race. Calling apartheid “one of the most vicious systems” isn’t rhetorical excess so much as a refusal to let the conversation shrink to spreadsheets. Tutu’s intent is unmistakable: to reframe international investment as a political act with blood-on-the-balance-sheet consequences, and to pressure outsiders to choose between profit and moral accountability.