When Kumi Naidoo, the South African-born human rights activist, was contacted in February by a recruitment company that wanted to know whether he would like to apply to be the next head of Greenpeace, he told them it wasn’t a good time to be calling.
“I was on the 19th day of a 21-day hunger strike to put pressure on the South African government to change its position on Zimbabwe,” he recalls.
“I was OK, I was still compos mentis, but I was a little weak and had already lost 14kg. I said: ‘Guys, this is not the best time to be thinking about jobs.’”
And there, perhaps, the matter might have rested, had Naidoo not happened to mention it to his 17-year-old daughter, who lives in Glasgow.
“She said: ‘Dad, I will not speak to you if you don’t at least think about it because Greenpeace is one of the best NGOs in the world, and when I grow up I would love to work for them.’ It has a kind of magic for young people,” he said.
When the company got back in touch a week later, Naidoo showed more enthusiasm and now, on the eve of the Copenhagen climate change conference, he has just started as the organization’s international executive director, responsible for 1,500 staff in 28 offices worldwide and with a budget of 200 million euros (US$301.8 million), supplied by 3 million individual donors. He makes the point on several occasions that one of Greenpeace’s greatest assets is its independence: It takes no money from governments or companies. Those 3 million members are its lifeblood.
I am meeting Naidoo in a prison in Amsterdam, but one that has been converted into a trendy hotel (breakfast, 17.50 euros). It’s Sunday morning and he has been in the city, where Greenpeace has its headquarters, for only four days. He is staying with friends while flat-hunting, and prefers to meet at this hotel in the converted dock area rather than at Greenpeace’s offices in the suburbs because he is still finding his way around.
It is raining when we meet, but he uncomplainingly stands outside for half an hour while the photographer takes pictures. He even takes his anorak off, which seems perverse, to reveal a slightly nautical-looking woolly jumper. Naidoo’s unpretentious clothes are at one with the man: relaxed, not trying to impress, innocent. His voice is soft and deep; his manner friendly. The only photograph I have seen of him before we meet was taken at the Gleneagles G8 summit in 2005, where he gave an ill-tempered press conference with Bono and Bob Geldof. In it, he looks fierce, almost dangerous. But the camera can lie. He tells me he and Geldof had just had a blazing row — Naidoo was less sanguine about the results of the summit than the singer-turned-savior — and they were still both fuming.
Naidoo, 44, is relatively new to environmentalism, so why did Greenpeace choose him?
“I think they wanted somebody who was a bridge-builder and an alliance-builder, someone who was mad enough to work 24/7, and someone who was not afraid to take risks,” he said.
He is the first African executive director, a symbol that the pressure group no longer belongs to the developed world.
“There’s an issue of justice here: people in developing countries have been least responsible for the climate catastrophe they find themselves in, but they are the ones who are paying the biggest and most brutal price,” he said.
He is also the first outsider to head the organization, and as such is seen as an agent of change. His aims are to give Greenpeace greater global reach, make it more populist and change its focus. The days of discrete campaigns — forests and oceans, tigers and whales — are over; now everything has to be tied together as the war on climate change rages.
“Part of our problem historically is that we’ve operated too much in silos. A measure of specialization is important, but there’s a thin line between specialization and parochialism,” he said.
The first thing he did when he started in Amsterdam was gather together the 150 staff at HQ for a meeting.
“I told them I thought the moment we are living in right now can best be described as a perfect storm. First, we had the fuel price crisis three years ago, and that led to a food price crisis. We have an ongoing poverty crisis where 50,000 men, women and children die every day from preventable causes. We’ve known about the climate crisis for some time now. And then the financial crisis was the final boot in the solar plexus. When you have such a convergence of crises, you have two options: you can get out a couple of Band-Aids, try to do a temporary fix and keep it as business as usual; or you can take a leaf out of Chinese culture, where the symbol for crisis is the same symbol for opportunity. I feel that we have to turn this moment into a point where humanity sobers up,” he said.
Naidoo is long on rhetoric but short on specifics, perhaps forgivably after only four days in the job. I worry about his propensity for cliche — I get “perfect storm,” “wake-up call” and “marathon, not a sprint” in the space of quarter of an hour — but there is no doubting his sincerity, and he has an earthiness and honesty I start to warm to. In the past, as head of the Adult Literacy Campaign in South Africa, then as founder director of the South African NGO Coalition and until last year as head of Civicus (the World Alliance for Citizen Participation), he has worked to build participatory democracy. He sees the Greenpeace job in a similar way, switching the emphasis away from elite units that undertake high-profile and often dangerous actions to a grassroots movement committed to getting governments to take climate change seriously.
Not that Greenpeace will be abandoning its fabled stunts; he just wants them to connect with mass protest. He says the organization’s commitment to non-violent direct action was one of the attractions of joining.
“I’ve been at many G8s. I’ve been part of delegations sitting around with [former British prime minister] Tony Blair in No. 10, [Russian Prime Minister Vladimir] Putin in Moscow and [German Chancellor]Angela Merkel in Berlin. Having access does not mean you have any influence; in fact, having access can sometimes reduce your influence. You think that because a powerful government official says roughly what you want to hear, you have made progress, but then at the first opportunity they make a U-turn or lower the bar,” he said.
A commitment to direct action means that if politicians backtrack on promises, Greenpeace can issue a few reminders.
“History teaches us that the only time you move forward is when decent men and women are prepared to stand up and put their lives on the line or take the risk that they will go to prison,” he said. “Even if I’m sitting at the World Economic Forum or G8, if the leaders inside know that there is another part of Greenpeace that is taking direct action, I guarantee you I will be listened to much better than if I didn’t have that outside.”
He doesn’t rule out abandoning the insider part of the strategy if no progress is being made.
“At the moment we remain committed to formal engagement, but I don’t think that is necessarily set in stone if repeatedly there is no return on those activities. We have to use those actions that deliver results,” he said.
Naidoo is critical of the stance US President Barack Obama is adopting in the run-up to Copenhagen, with his apparent desire to dampen expectations of a binding agreement.
“The two phrases that stood out in Obama’s [campaign] speeches were the ‘fierce urgency of now,’ an invocation of Martin Luther King, and ‘a planet in peril.’ We have scientists telling us now that things are even more serious. So while we can be very sympathetic to the health reform bill he is trying to get through Congress, we expect him to keep a couple of balls in the air at the same time,” he said.
He also has harsh words for Blair, with whom he appeared at a pre-Copenhagen meeting in September.
“He said: ‘Don’t make the perfect the enemy of the good.’ I find this very irritating. Perfect has long gone on this issue. Perfect would have been if we had acted fast enough to have prevented the glaciers melting in the Himalayas, prevented sea water contaminating the fresh water supply in Bangladesh, prevented the fact that people are already having to be moved from their homes in the Pacific islands. If Tony Blair or anyone else thinks perfect is still an option, then clearly they have closed their eyes and ears to what the developing countries have already had to endure, and are looking at it in the cocooned way of saying, ‘Well, we can still largely protect Europe, the US and the rich parts of the world,’” Naidoo said.
How optimistic is Naidoo that something worthwhile will emerge from Copenhagen?
“I would be putting myself in a box marked extremely romantic and naive if I said my hopes were high. But having said that, it ain’t over until the thin man and the fat lady sings,” he said.
He insists he is not referring to Merkel.
“We are pushing right until the last minute to get the best possible outcome. Obama says it won’t be a legally binding treaty and that we’ll only get a political framework, but much as he is the most important person in the room, I don’t think it’s a done deal. It ain’t over till it’s over,” he said.
Naidoo, who is of Indian extraction and was brought up in a lower-middle-class home in a Durban township, has been an activist since he was 14, when “the lights suddenly went on” and he realized apartheid was both mad and insupportable. He campaigned for equality in education, was expelled from school at 15, studied at home to pass an exam at 17 that got him into university (a racially segregated one), studied law, worked for the political underground and left South Africa for his own safety in 1987 to take up a Rhodes scholarship at Oxford, where he did a Dphil on political resistance in Durban.
His young life was stalked by tragedy. His mother committed suicide when he was 15.
“She was 38 and had issues with my dad,” he said falteringly.
“She just reached a moment where it felt too much. During that apartheid period there were very high levels of suicide: There was no support for people. It was a surprise to us. She left a note, took an overdose, and was gone within hours. It feels like yesterday,” he said.
In 1988 his closest friend, Lenny Naidu, was murdered by a South African special forces unit.
“His death was the one that set me on my path — the struggle for justice and to make the world a better place. In my last conversation with him before we fled in different directions into exile, he was very philosophical and asked me what was the best contribution you could make to the cause of humanity and justice,” Naidoo said.
“I said: ‘That’s very easy, it’s giving your life.’ He said: ‘You mean participating in demonstrations and getting shot and killed.’ I said: ‘I guess so,’ and he said: ‘No, that’s the wrong answer. It’s not giving your life, but giving the rest of your life.’ I was 22 years old. I didn’t know what he was talking about. But when I got the call two years later that he had been killed, I had to think deep and hard about that last conversation,” Naidoo said.
He also lost a close friend from Oxford, Oxfam organizer Joan Wright, who was killed in a car crash in South Africa shortly after Naidoo had returned in 1990 to his newly liberalized homeland.
“My story is an African story,” he said. “We have to endure loss of loved ones on a much more regular basis [than in the West]. I’ve had more than my fair share of loss, but sadly it’s not peculiar in the African context.”
It may be that this is where he gets his steel, the ability to criticize Obama and Blair, face Geldof’s expletive-filled tirades.
The release of Nelson Mandela in 1990 was a shock.
“Suddenly we had to think about a future, a career path, pensions, things that hadn’t previously been in our vocabulary. It was quite an adjustment to have to make,” he said.
Naidoo’s key career moment came in 1993 when he was offered a job with the African National Congress (ANC).
“I was asked to head up the ANC’s media production division by Walter Sisulu, who was the most senior person in the ANC and one of my heroes,” he said. “I turned it down after much angsting and discussion with colleagues.”
One of his main reasons for choosing activism and community organization rather than politics was a conversation he had with one of his mentors, Mary Mkwanazi.
“She was a domestic worker and trade union organizer,” Naidoo said. “When I was deciding whether to head up the Adult Literacy Campaign or go into the ANC, she said to me: ‘If you want to be on TV and be famous then go and do the ANC job. If you really want to make a difference, go and do the adult literacy job.’”
He believes activists have advantages over politicians.
“The constraints of election cycles and the compromises forced on you by the Realpolitik of governing mean that often you can’t speak truth to power. I think politicians are overrated, and the role they play in society is disproportionately more valued than the role faith leaders, trade union leaders, NGO leaders and media people play,” he said.
Naidoo’s Glasgow-based daughter is the product of a friendship with a young woman in Oxford when he was a student. The couple never lived together, though they remain friends. His long-term partner lives in Johannesburg and the relationship will henceforth be sustained across two continents. He explains that there is no point in her moving to Amsterdam, as much of his time will in any case be spent traveling.
He says he has been overwhelmed by messages of support, both at home in South Africa and from across the world, since his appointment was announced. But the expectations are scarily high.
“I’ve had everything from, let’s hope Greenpeace can deliver an ambitious climate treaty, to getting everybody to love each other, be peaceful and save the planet,” he said.
He laughs, a deep and throaty laugh that suggests not nervousness but self-belief.
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