October 2012 ICTs, the Internet and Sustainability: An Interview with Jay Naidoo The following is the record of an interview with Jay Naidoo, chair of the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition and a member of the Broadband Commission for Digital Development. The interview was conducted by David Souter, senior associate, IISD and managing director of ict Development Associates, in June 2012. This interview is one in a series of papers being published by IISD’s Global Connectivity team to inform and stimulate discussion and debate on the relationship between information and communication technologies (ICTs), the Internet and sustainability, surrounding the UN Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro in June 2012 (Rio+20), the UN Internet Governance Forum in Baku in November 2012 and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) World Conference on International Telecommunications in Dubai in December 2012 (WCIT-12). Jay Naidoo was a prominent activist against apartheid in South Africa. He was the founding General Secretary of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), one of the central pillars of the anti-apartheid struggle. He was elected to the first democratically elected Parliament in 1994 and served first as the Minister of Reconstruction and Development Programme in President Mandela’s office before becoming Minister of Communications. He left formal politics in 1999 and co-founded an investment company while remaining engaged in the development sector. He served for a decade as Chairperson of the Development Bank of Southern Africa, a premier development finance institution that drives the delivery of infrastructure. He also became Chairperson of the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition, a public–private partnership fighting world malnutrition, and serves on a number of international bodies including the Broadband Commission for Digital Development. You’ve just come back from Rio+20. Can you tell me how you feel about it? Was it a step forward or a missed opportunity? It was a completely missed opportunity. I am convinced that we will never make a breakthrough if we continue engaging in a negotiations process without grassroots organizations connecting to the challenges that people face daily as a result of climate change: from lack of access to clean drinking water and energy to sanitation, food and nutrition security. The Rio+20 negotiations process was dominated by those that are causing the climate crisis because they are powerfully organized. They represent the “dirty industries”—the extractive industries—and powerful political elites with vested interests. The voices of concerned governments, civil society, trade unions and the private sector in the green economy are being marginalized. www.iisd.org The International Institute for Sustainable Development We need a completely new approach. A prerequisite is going back to where people are at the coal face and connecting the challenges they face to the way in which the global economy works. Can I take you to the big picture over the 25 years since the Brundtland Report? Would you say the adoption of sustainable development as an objective of the international community has made any difference to ordinary people’s lives in Africa since then? Nearly 60 years have passed since the world declared the end of war and the promise of an era of peace, prosperity and sustainable development for all. We have seen the accumulation of unprecedented global wealth but still billions are living in extreme poverty. We need to ask ourselves where we went wrong and what are the systemic structural causes that trap so many in such hardship and adversity. The Brundtland Report 25 years ago took us forward and defined a conceptual framework for sustainable development that placed the symbiotic relationship of people and the environment at the centre. Out of that flowed a conviction that tackling poverty and inequality through an environmentally sustainable economic strategy was going to be the heart of sustainable development. It shaped the character and the outcome of the Earth Summit held in Rio in 1992. This debate then morphed into a paradigm that economics driven by free markets on its own could lift people out of poverty. The fall of the Berlin Wall was a victory for democracy but opened the way for a unipolar world and a form of triumphant capitalism. The evidence today is contrary. An unfettered free-market system has created an economic crisis, a deep financial crisis that led to widespread speculation, caused spikes in the prices of staple foods, plunged hundreds of millions into poverty and hunger and jobless despair. A new apartheid rises in the world dividing the global rich from an overwhelming majority of global poor. We face a perfect storm. We stand at the edge of the precipice, where we are plundering the Earth’s resources far beyond its capability and sustainability—a completely unsustainable path of economic development that puts the very planet we live on at risk. This for me is our greatest challenge. In a recent article on the outcomes of Rio, you argued that there had been a failure of global leadership on sustainable development. You also lamented the absence of “people’s voices” from the debate. I wonder if you could say something about how you think these two issues, which you obviously see as being linked, might be addressed, given the structures of international policy making and national policy making that we have. If there is a failure of global leadership, how do you get global leaders to take a more responsible approach? I reflect on our freedom struggle in South Africa. 1976 was our Tahrir Square, when millions of my generation went into the streets to protest against apartheid. We were smashed by a brutal state. We went back to the drawing board and realized that unless we organized our people, we would not achieve fundamental change. We organized our communities around the “bread and butter” issues of high rents and transport costs, access to quality education and health, water, housing and the basic rights of our people. We built the most powerful labour movement in Africa and one of the most militant in the world. What we realized was that freedom didn’t stop when we won rights at the factory floor. Our membership recognized that rights we won there were inextricably linked to the struggle for political rights. It was that coalition of mass-based organizations that created the political stalemate that allowed iconic leaders like Nelson Mandela to pursue a negotiations strategy that created our political miracle. IISD COMMENTARY OCTOBERThe International 2012 Institute for Sustainable Development ICTs, the Internet and Sustainability: An Interview with Jay Naidoo 2 It had taken us 18 years from 1976 to install South Africa’s first democratically elected government with President Nelson Mandela at its helm. Our political miracle was the mobilization of billions of people across the world who took a stand against social injustice, racism and apartheid. I see the same thing today. In the world there is an absence of global leadership that is inspiring, that can lead by example, which can present a view of the world we want, that is sustainable for our people and for the planet. Powerful and narrow economic and political elites dominate many of our governments. I look at the solutions they present. They do not answer the economic, financial, food and ecological crises we face. Their solutions are based on a paradigm of consumption from the past which we know is unsustainable. The science shows us that it will lead to rises in global temperature of over two degrees. I’ve been to north of Kenya around Lake Turkana: I’ve seen one of the largest lakes drying up, the fish dying and people starving to death. I have seen the growing conflicts over the fast disappearing grazing lands. Wherever I go across Africa and Asia I see desperation of the poor, who hardly own a refrigerator but face the brunt of climate change. I see the impact of flooding in Thailand, Pakistan and India. I am told by villagers how they now have to drill 10 times deeper for water from their boreholes. I see the rising household food insecurity in the growing slums that surround our cities, which are collapsing under the uncontrolled urban migration fleeing the poverty and hunger in the rural areas. And yet the climate skeptics dominate the talks at a global level like we saw at the Rio+20 Summit. We need to bring in the legitimate leaders that come from the communities that are worst affected. We need to organize these communities so that their voices and their issues are heard. We need to build a political narrative around issues that the poor face. It is the issues of food, water and sanitation that lead to diarrhea and pneumonia, and kill millions of innocent children each year; it is the infectious diseases like HIV/AIDS and measles that drive infant mortality. The poor do not talk about greenhouse gases or carbon sequestration. Until civil society can connect the debates at a global level to where the bulk of the people live, we will be weak and fragmented and ineffectual at determining the big picture. My conviction is that we need the poor to speak for themselves. And ICTs can help to give them voice. Is there a failure of civil society there as well? Are civil society’s structures failing to bring the kind of people you are talking about into the centre of the debate? I have sat in many conferences and workshops on sustainable development. A whole development industry has spawned a class of poverty consultants. Global development assistance has been packaged into projects.