‘My mother’s values run deep in me’
AY Naidoo credits two people with influencing his life: his mother and Steve Biko. “I never heard her complain,” he said about his mother, Bakkium. “In our household, we didn’t have much money. But people would arrive hungry and my mother would feed them. Our house was like a railway station; people coming and going. And my mother practised kindness, service and honesty.
“From her I learnt not to see colour or religion, because while we have different tributaries, we are one ocean of humanity. Her values run deep in me. I witnessed her sacrifice and friendship, and it made me who I am today.”
Naidoo would go on to become the general-secretary of the Congress of South African Trade Unions from 1985 to 1993.
He would serve as minister responsible for the Reconstruction and Development Programme in president Nelson Mandela’s office (1994-1996) and as minister of Post, Telecommunications, and Broadcasting (1996-1999).
He would play a pivotal role in the Struggle against apartheid, leading the largest trade union federation in South Africa. Today, Naidoo acts as the chairman of the Partnership Council of the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition, based in Geneva.
He is part of the board of the Mo Ibrahim Foundation, established to promote African development. He serves in an advisory capacity for a number of international organisations, including the Broadband Commission of the International Telecommunications Union, the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation and the Lead Committee of the UN Secretary-General on Nutrition. He is also the patron of “Scatterlings of Africa”, a palaeontological foundation linking archaeological sites across Africa.
Naidoo was a student in 1976, growing up in a volatile, racist South Africa, when he attended a lecture by Steve Biko.
“I was angry,” he said. “I was born in Greenwood Park and we were evicted because of the Group Areas Act, and I never understood it. I never understood why I couldn’t go to the beach, the Indian Ocean, as an Indian. Biko inspired us. He told us to be proud of being black, that we should be confident in our identity, that we had dignity and purpose that no one could take away from us.”
I asked Naidoo to describe
Change: Organising Tomorrow, Today, what it felt like at that time.
“It was electric,” he said. “You could almost feel the change in the air. You could feel that we were on the brink of something. I remember it like it was yesterday.
“In that period,” said Naidoo, “I knew Biko to be extraordinarily charismatic and courageous. He was a man prepared to walk the full mile. He was a principled leader and he reminded us that our first task was to unite. He began to organise the revolution.”
Speaking to POST a day after the launch of his second book, Change: Organising Tomorrow, Today, he said: “I think our country has reached a tipping point. The ANC has fundamentally disappointed us and lost its moral compass. We are a rich country, but 14 million still go hungry, 1.4 million are still unemployed. We have crises in education, in service delivery and it’s down to a failure of leadership.
“It’s the rise of the god presidents.
“Presidents and leaders who think they are God’s gift, instead of being servant leaders. Instead of dialogue and resolution, they divide and rule. They are committed to themselves, and not the people. I think that today, the youth have lost their trust in government. They don’t even register to vote. The fact that people fought and gave their lives to be able to vote, and now the youth seem to not even care, is shocking. We need to have conversations at home, we need to teach them that we are one.
“In a way, that’s why I wrote this book. When my daughter turned 21, I asked her about the possibility of grandchildren. And she said, ‘Dad, you spent your whole life fighting for social justice, why would I want to bring a child into a world (that) you yourself say is facing a crisis? Human greed is disembowelling us’.
“But, you know, I spent my life fighting for change, changing the system, and you know what? We succeeded. We can’t tackle issues like human trafficking, poverty, crime by doing it country by country. We need to think globally; work together. We need to organise ourselves.
“Just like Steve Biko started by reminding us to first unite before we could change anything, now we need to unite again, if we ever want to see things change.”