How to Fight Inequality by Ben Phillips

Author:Ben Phillips [Phillips, Ben]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2020-09-28T18:30:00+00:00

Now, too, we must make our own history.

Journal: Great campaigns have lots of things in common, but they’re not the things we’re often taught

When I was young, I got involved in campaigns because I was passionate about them. But when I became an NGO professional, I was taught to be much more focused on realism, cool-headed analysis, and the careful assessment of strategies. What matters, I was told, is what works.

So, in that spirit, I talked to four leaders whose campaigns have definitely succeeded in order to find out what it was that really made the difference. Jay Naidoo led the South African trade union movement’s struggle against apartheid; Ann Pettifor headed the Jubilee 2000 campaign to cancel third world debt; Lilian Njehu worked alongside the Nobel Prize-winning environmentalist Wangari Maathai in the campaign to save Kenya’s forests; Kumuti Majhi is a tribal leader from Niyamgiri in India who defeated the Vedanta corporation’s plans to mine his people’s land.

As each of these campaigners were at pains to point out, all successes are partial and impermanent, and no victory is won by one person alone, but nevertheless these are winners. They are all different, but they do have lots of things in common. It’s just that they’re not the things that I’d been taught.

First of all, I asked them if they knew that they would win when they began their campaigns. I thought they might set out the practical reasons behind their confidence, the power mapping they had done and the assessments they had made. But none of them described anything like that at all. Pettifor told me ‘No, I was sure at the beginning that we could not win’, and shared how there had been an internal argument over the branding of the campaign as Jubilee 2000 because she and others ‘could not see how we could make debt a big issue with that identity in just five years … but I was wrong. Our identity, and its deep symbolism embedded in Islam, Judaism and Christianity, was vital to our success.’

Others said that they did know they would win, but not because they’d conducted any formal planning or analysis. Instead, it was a matter of heartfelt conviction. ‘This was the land that our forefathers died for’, as Njehu put it. ‘Because we have faith in our people and “Niyam Raja”’ was Majhi’s response, ‘We worship Niyamgiri as our living God and under no circumstances will we leave our God. Our struggle has gone through many ups and downs, but we never stopped – even during the worst time of our life.’ Naidoo described how he got involved in the struggle against apartheid because of Steve Biko. ‘Steve didn’t give us a project plan or a log frame or a budget’, he told me, ‘he gave us a direction to follow, and pride. He taught us to love ourselves, and that we had nothing to lose but our chains.’

That’s a clue to the second lesson of their experience: all successful campaigns

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