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.
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.
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