When Tom Hunter says he plans to get serious about something, he seems to mean it. Earlier this year, after touring Africa with former US president Bill Clinton, Hunter -- now Sir Thomas Hunter -- resolved to get serious about philanthropy for a continent in turmoil.
The result? A promise of US$100 million for projects to wrest Africans from poverty. Not bad for a man of 44 who started off his business career with borrowed money, selling sneakers.
In Africa's context, of course, aid and benefaction are familiar enough topics. But Hunter plows a more iconoclastic furrow.
PHOTO: NEW YORK TIMES
As a Scot, he comes from a land stereotyped as parsimonious, and yet he has become one of Britain's most prominent philanthropists, embracing an approach to giving that is far more familiar in the US than in Britain.
As a businessman who built a small sneaker business into a chain of 260 stores, he also looks for big returns on his investments, more usually these days in British property and real estate. In Africa, he reckons, the payback will come when the people he has set out to help ask him to leave because they can manage their own affairs.
"We don't want to create a dependency culture in Africa," Hunter said. "We make an investment. We want a return. We wouldn't just give the money and hope for the best. I am a Scotsman after all."
Hunter's plan is to bypass the usual channels of development aid, such as government ministries, aid agencies and nongovernmental organizations, instead providing closely audited injections of cash to permit the poorest villagers to grow more abundant crops and strive for their own way out of deprivation. He plans to spend money on health care, AIDS and education in the same villages in order, as he put it in a recent speech, "to enable them to take their first step up on the rungs of development."
Hunter calls his form of giving "venture philanthropy," drawing a parallel with the venture capitalism, or private equity investment, pursued by his company West Coast Capital.
But why would a hard-headed and successful businessman -- worth more than US$1 billion according to an annual list published in London's Sunday Times -- display what cynics might depict as a naivete that has left many would-be saviors to rue the day they resolved to venture into Africa?
The answer, as Hunter tells it, lies in his childhood as the son of a modest greengrocer, and his youth in a coal mining village plunged into poverty when Scotland's state-supported heavy industry -- mining, shipbuilding and steelmaking -- collapsed in the second half of the 20th century. More than some others, he is aware of the contrast between deprivation and riches.
Hunter's philanthropy is also a question of the way people -- a few people, in the nature of things -- react to large amounts of money of the kind Hunter acquired in 1998 when a rival bought his chain of sneaker outlets, called Sports Division.
Some people spend it. Others might hoard it. Still more might seek to multiply it on the stock market. As Hunter, who owns a Lear jet and a luxury yacht, likes to put it: "Once you fulfill the material needs -- the house, the boat, the plane -- what's next?
"I think that when I sold the business, I got the equivalent of US$500 million when I was 37, and I had started 14 years earlier with nothing. At 37, I started to think, what is it all about? Something I would take my whole life to do I had achieved quite early. I came to the view that money was only half the argument. What you do with the money is what marks you out," he said.
Hunter grew up in New Cumnock, a Scottish village near the west coast town of Troon, where he still has his principal home (the other is in the south of France) and his business offices. It is a raw neighborhood, scarred by mine closures, and his own land's plight concerns him.
Some of Hunter's first philanthropic ventures were designed to instill entrepreneurial instincts in Scottish school children by introducing them to the profit and loss of running a pizza business.
It was only this year, though, that Hunter emerged from relative obscurity. His name is still not widely known in Britain. After a fundraising dinner with Clinton and an invitation to join the former president on a tour of African countries, Hunter embarked with Clinton on a trip in July that led to the announcement, in October, of the US$100 million Clinton-Hunter Development Initiative.
It was in October, too, that Prince Charles laid a ceremonial sword on Hunter's shoulders to bestow a knighthood on him.
"I was incredibly proud," he said. "I had a feeling of disbelief. So much in such a short period of time."
Hunter takes pains to distinguish his projects from traditional aid projects. He calls the strategies of international aid agencies "a busted flush," accusing them of caring more about their own survival than about the poor. He describes his US$100 million contribution as a "drop in the ocean," and is determined that his philanthropy will be run on business lines with clear targets and exit strategies.
For all his far-flung ambitions, Hunter depicts himself as something of a family man, a homebody. His father, Campbell Hunter, 78, has a job in his company, and his wife plays a major role in the charitable foundation. His three children -- two boys and a girl, all between 10 and 15 -- accompany their parents to Africa.
"It's good that they see life isn't all about private planes and boats," he said.
He likes to be home at night whenever he can, Hunter said, particularly Sundays when he eats fish and chips with his former school friends of less exalted financial status.
"It keeps me grounded," he said.
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
Armed with 4,000 eggs and a truckload of sugar and cream, French pastry chefs on Wednesday completed a 121.8m-long strawberry cake that they have claimed is the world’s longest ever made. Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect. The effort overtook a 100.48m-long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019. El Gatou’s cake also used 350kg of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of
RSS