The Pope turned his sights on Africa’s corrupt plutocrats yesterday, accusing them of being anaesthetised to people’s suffering by their own unbridled consumption.
In a stinging rebuke to the continent’s leaders he accused the “minorities who cling to power and wealth” of squandering their money while the poor and downtrodden were forgotten in “abandoned, filthy and rundown peripheries”.
He was speaking from the Kangemi slum, on the outskirts of Nairobi, where at least 50,000 people live in cramped and often unsanitary conditions without access to basic services such as running water.
He said that the “dreadful injustice of social exclusion” left the poor without land, lodging or labour as they struggled to survive without the basic state services. “By this I mean toilets, sewers, drains,