Interview: ICTs, the Internet and Sustainability: Jay Naidoo

This is an interview that was conducted by David Souter, senior associate, IISD and managing director of ict Development Associates, in June 2012. The PDF to this interview can be downloaded by clicking on? the link that follows.

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The Interview follows below.

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 marginalised.
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.
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. A new obsession with evidence-based funding has razed the ?green shoots? ?projects with promise?to conform to a narrow basket of indicators used to assess ?best practice.? They squash innovation and batter activists into a compliance nightmare that mainly satisfies bean counters in some distant foreign capital.
This has weakened and fragmented our struggle for social justice and human dignity. There is ferment in the world, as demonstrated in the Arab Spring that toppled the unassailable dictators of North Africa. Their cries have been echoed in the Occupy Movements and the growing momentum against corruption and the demand for the fundamental human right of access to quality education, health and food across the world. Civil society cannot claim any leadership role in these spontaneous outbursts of people?s anger.
There are many civil society organizations and NGOs doing sterling work, but very much in silos. Institutional brand competition, often for funding, is distorting the mechanics of organizing our communities around the bread and butter issues they face.
We need to go back to the basics. Technology and the social media are important tools that can be harnessed to mobilize and organize our people but do not replace the painstaking work that needs to happen. We have to build the bargaining power of our people and bring grassroots voices into the forums where our future is being negotiated. That is the only way civil society leaders can have legitimacy.
Can I shift the focus to the relationship between ICTs, the Internet and sustainability? Has the information revolution of the past 25 years contributed to sustainability?
I think it has. When I was Minister of Telecommunications in the Mandela cabinet I regarded ICTs as the basic need of all basic needs. Closing the digital divide is a revolutionary step towards delivering sustainable development. Our struggle against apartheid was a struggle for voice. Once people have voice, knowledge and information, they are able to make decisions that affect their lives at a very personal level. We can use communications technology to leapfrog stages of development.
In 1996, African Ministers of Telecommunication met and agreed to find African solutions to the African problem of connectivity. We were not convened by an international agency. Our starting point was: ?Sub-Saharan Africa has fewer telephones than the city of New York or Tokyo.? That was an indictment on us.
We identified the obstacles. How do we create an environment that attracts private sector investment because it was the private sector that was largely driving the growth of telecommunications globally? Telecommunications went beyond our geographical boundaries. We ensured that the spectrum was harmonized, that our laws and policies gave certainty and predictability to the potential investors we were talking to. We sought to set up independent regulators which would guarantee a level playing field between different operators and ensure universal obligations and would deliver services to rural areas and underserviced areas.
We worked systematically to prepare the ground for investment in Africa. We understood the need to facilitate crossborder operations, which needed the economy of scale.
Within South Africa we recognized that telecommunications would not be the spending priority of the new government, given the competing social needs around education, health and basic needs of our people. The requirement for modernizing the backbone and digitizing the infrastructure ran into billions of dollars, which meant that we had to crowd in the private sector.
But we made mistakes. One was not appreciating how quickly mobile technology would take off. I remember the first debate I had with the mobile operators in South Africa, when I said I wanted them to build base stations in the rural areas. They said to me, ?But Minister, we have just started our operation. We cannot afford to go into the rural areas yet because we are still building up a business.?
However the regulations on community obligations spurred R&D that produced the prepaid card, which was the gamechanger in telecommunications. Suddenly individual customers across the income spectrum were able to budget and afford to have a mobile phone. It no longer just served the wealthy. The most modern technology had become accessible and the era of fixed line phones had increasingly become obsolete.
Economic opportunity and efficiency was enhanced and the mobile phone became an essential part of people?s lives. If you go to townships today we see old containers that have been transformed into phone shops that offer not just digital uploads of airtime but a whole range of other electronic services. They became businesses. I could see the way that telecommunications was transforming the lives of people ? giving them access to computers, technology, information, knowledge and livelihoods for the first time.
Does it offer regulatory models for any other areas of sustainability, like climate change and so forth, or is it specific to the ICT sector?
The use of technology, and mobile technology in particular, is so wide-faceted in development today. Rwanda and other countries are using it to monitor administration of anti-retrovirals and getting information on people?s resistance to treatment in real time. Ten per cent of the GDP of Kenya now circulates in the M-Pesa payment system that operates on a mobile platform. Women farmers can access markets to find out prices so that their bargaining power is boosted when they negotiate with the middlemen. Increasingly people are adapting the technology to their specific needs.
The inclusion of community obligations within the regulatory framework for ICTs nurtured many of these innovations; it is possible that similar approaches could be put in place to stimulate innovation around locally managed green technologies.
I am convinced that access to broadband is going to deepen democracy?and ensure greater accountability from leaders, whether they are in the corporate, government sector or the civil society sector. The more informed the people are, the more aware they are of their rights, and the more they can demand transparency and accountability of their leaders. I think that there is enormous anger rising in the world today?that of ordinary people who can barely feed themselves a plate of food, but who see the wealth of a small minority who flaunt their wealth.
I believe that for the first time in the history of humanity we have an opportunity for all of us to talk the same language. Young people are increasingly connecting with other young people around the world, to solve the crisis that my generation has caused.
What you are describing is what many people would call the emergence of an Information Society. How important do you see that to the movement for sustainable development?
Young people have grown up with technology. Like my children, they don?t need to read manuals anymore. They connect seamlessly. They understand each other. My generation has betrayed them. We have created an ecological crisis and an economic system driven by human greed that is unsustainable. One activist at the Peoples Summit in Rio asked me, ?These people have been negotiating for 20 years. Have any of them changed???
Young people today need to define their bold vision, find their voice and discover that anything is possible if fearless leaders embrace the human values of respect, honesty, humility and service.
Technology can accelerate social and income inequality or it could be used to level the playing field. The Arab Spring demonstrated the positive spinoff. Technological innovation could be the key in driving social inclusion.
The outcome document from Rio+20 barely mentions information technology. Changes in information technology are probably the most substantial and dramatic changes in society over the last 20 years, yet they didn?t seem to be discussed at Rio. Would that be fair?
Industrialized nations have backtracked from the commitment made in Rio 20 years ago. Today we are talking about transfer of technology on a pricing model that is market-related. They are reversing obligations on development aid equivalent to 0.7 per cent of GDP. We need to take the negotiations about the sustainable development goals out of the hands of elites and the bureaucrats in the global development industry and bring organized voices of the poor, who experience the impact of climate change, to the table. Civil society voices are much more engaged in international debates like Rio than they were 30 years ago?but the process needs to be accelerated, widened and deepened.
Clearly, ICTs can support these processes?most likely in ways that will be defined by people participating in them.
There is also an environmental downside to the information revolution, which is that it is a growing source of greenhouse gas emissions and a major source of waste generation. Those are issues that need to be addressed, but whose responsibility is it to address them?
The technology revolution contributed hugely to the consumption patterns we see in the world; that is the root of our climate crisis. It created an obscene scramble for gizmos that could make people millionaires overnight. Our human greed was the altar on which new idols of wealth were worshipped. When that toxic mix of advertising, derivatives and fund managers coalesced, the bubble had to burst, as it did in the financial bubble of 2009.
The technology is not a magic bullet. It does not replace organizing people, working on concrete initiatives and building our capacity to demand our rights. It has to be exploited to build the human resources and systems to deliver development. Many philanthropists fail to understand that politics is the greatest hurdle. The search for a vaccine for HIV/AIDS or malaria, for example, must go alongside strengthening the health care systems that are supposed to get that vaccine down to the village level.
The development equation succeeds when people feel that they are part of the decision making that led to the initiative being taken; success reflects the extent to which they own it and the extent to which they can benefit from it. When people are organized around their demands, then we?ll be delivering sustainable development. Technology harnessed for development has the potential to leapfrog the poor in our global village into the 21st century, as we see with mobile phones.
But the ICT industry also exposes workers to hazardous substances and produces e-waste, especially in parts of South East Asia, where major corporations locate their companies in zones that are union- free and where labour conditions laid down by the International Labour Organisation are not observed.
The Brundtland Report placed an active citizenry at the core of sustainable development. We will win when we understand our human rights and are able through that lens to declare, ?These are our rights as citizens of the world, and we need to hold our leaders accountable.?

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Source: http://www.jaynaidoo.org/interview-icts-the-internet-and-sustainability/

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