CAPE TOWN — (ENI) A South African Presbyterian church leader has said poverty in the country is now worse than apartheid, and a "terrible disease" hindering the creation of Christian congregations.

"Apartheid was a terrible crime against humanity. It left people with deep scars, but I can assure you poverty is worse than that," the Rev. Faleni Mzukisi of the Presbyterian Church of Africa told participants of the 2008 World Association of Christian Communication congress, when they visited Gugulethu Presbyterian Church on the outskirts of Cape Town on October 8.

Mzukisi said that whilst apartheid denied rights and privileges, poverty meant people could neither meet their human needs nor attain proper dignity, the absence of which, he said, was humiliating, Still, the Presbyterian pastor said he blamed apartheid for being the root cause of the impoverished situation of people today, such as those who live in Gugulethu.

"How do you preach to somebody who went to bed hungry, has no job a father who has no means of maintaining his own family? How do you build a stable church from people who have been destroyed by poverty?" queried Mzukisi. "You can only build a stable church from stable families. If families are not stable, I do not think we will get stable churches."

Mzukisi, who is minister of a church from the neighboring Nyanga parish, said, "People do not eat human rights; they want food on the table."

He said poverty was the main cause of crime in South Africa, and had led to

escalating HIV infection rates, and disability. These issues, he added, affected the church because it had limited resources at hand to deal with the situation.

"We have programs about poverty but talking without practical solutions becomes an academic issue," Mzukisi said.

"We appreciate what the government is doing on poverty and HIV but the

resources are not enough. They are not going to be enough soon," Mzukisi told his WACC visitors and further noted that the damage done by apartheid had been so enormous that it could not be rectified in the years following the abolition of the policy in the early 1990s.

Still, "We keep telling people that there is hope," said Mzukisi, whose

church members are mostly black people.

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