Friday, February 02, 2007

Ex-soap seller trying to erase stain of poverty

from The Guardian

The highly paid former Unilever head has spent 10 years working to alleviate the plight of Africa

Jane Martinson

As a party to talk about Africa and poverty, it was a pretty impressive one. Bill and Bono were there, so were Tony and Thabo. And presiding over them all was Niall FitzGerald, the former head of one of the world's biggest multinationals turned campaigner for a continent.

He may have been wearing an eye-watering orange jumper that stood out in a sea of grey suits, but the 61-year-old former Unilever chairman was entirely at ease chairing a debate on Africa at the World Economic Forum in Davos that included the world's richest man, the political leaders of Britain and South Africa and a campaigning rock star. He has, after all, been involved in every similar debate at the Swiss mountain gabfest for at least half a decade. "I've been on every Davos panel, hammering home the same message, for years," he says.

In many ways, Niall FitzGerald, chairman of media and information group Reuters and board member of the forum itself, is the quintessential Davos man. A multi-millionaire who spent more than 30 years selling everything from Dove soap to Vaseline around the world, he has spent much of the past decade espousing the cause of poor Africans. A former Communist party member who then worked in apartheid South Africa, the youthful-looking FitzGerald now counts some of the richest and most powerful men as his friends. Of the 11 plutocrats discussing the issue in Davos, he admits: "I know most of those around the table reasonably well."

After the session, Bono says: "What he did was really hard work and he did it well." FitzGerald, born in Limerick, comments: "Us Irishmen are always nice to each other."

Good company and committed, he tries to be flippant but cannot quite hide how seriously he takes it all. Unusually for a businessman as well as a politician, he really tries to answer questions he admits he doesn't want to. He talks about the controversy over his £1.2m payout from Unilever by saying that it was the board's decision and that he'd always meant to leave early.

Although he is glad that the "celebs cluttering the place" had gone from a more serious Davos this year, he name drops almost shamelessly. "Once Mandela looks at you, you're gone," he says. He embodies as well as anyone the often paradoxical notion of Big Business wanting to do good.

No bleeding heart

Although he describes himself as "generically a social democrat, which means I could exist in any of the three parties", the man who negotiated a benchmark-setting annual fee of £500,000 when he joined Reuters as non-executive chairman in 2004 is no bleeding-heart liberal. His views on why it matters that more than 300 million Africans live on $1 a day are a well-rehearsed mix of moral, economic and strategic. It's easy to see why Nelson Mandela picked him to head the UK arm of his legacy trust. "Even if you don't believe in the moral reasons for doing something about it, if you're a selfish person who doesn't give a damn about anything but yourself, we still have to do something about Africa for strategic reasons," he says.

For some time he has argued that oil supplies in Africa, local tensions between Islam and Christianity and the fact that its mass migration turns into destabilising immigration, especially in Europe, makes improving the lot of many poor Africans a matter of self-interest. "Even if you're just selfish about it, just to protect what you have, you have to do something. Otherwise, it'll leap up and bite you."

Action has long failed to live up to such rhetoric. Since the UK-backed Make Poverty History campaign was launched in 2005, little has changed on the ground. "The rhetoric was terrific, the intention was great but there wasn't necessarily the mechanisms on the ground to make it all work," he says.

When we first talked, straight after his star-studded session in Davos, it was before a series of side meetings led to a breakthrough of sorts on global trade. FitzGerald, also chairman of the International Business Council of 100 leading companies, was involved in them all. But in the spirit of Davos, which is never quite as open as it would like to appear, he cannot say anything about them.

When we talk again in London, FitzGerald says a deal is "within touching distance". It could benefit Africa by allowing it more freedom to trade with the rest of the world.

Arguments about foreign businesses abusing host states are not new to FitzGerald. "There's a subconscious feeling with some people that to admit to doing well in Africa and to running a profitable successful business somehow or other you must be exploiting Africa," he says.

He must have felt the same way as a young communist? In response, he first tries to suggest his flirtation with the party was to do with the fact that "that's where the prettiest girls were" before admitting that he had a real "conviction for social justice".

"I was actively engaged. I wanted to change the world and I wanted to do it next week. But you know, if you're not an idealist when you're 20, God knows what you're going to be at 60."

He credits his decision to work for Unilever with advice from a teacher. "He told me that if I believed strongly in social justice I shouldn't go into politics because I don't have the skills, the patience. He told me to be as successful as I can be and when you have real influence, use those convictions."

The turning point came when he was asked to head Unilever's business in apartheid South Africa. Are his current efforts inspired in part by guilt, I ask? "No, not at all," he says, firmly. "When I was asked to go to South Africa, I was seriously reluctant to do so ... But it's very easy to stand outside, observe and be critical. You get more done if you get inside and get your fingernails dirty."

He ended segregated toilet blocks for staff during his time there but his chief achievement was to focus on making the business itself successful. "We grew market share, increased the return on capital, but we did it in a way that was consistent with our values." He also began a lifelong love affair with Africa, despite almost being killed in a car accident. "Africa got into my bloodstream in the 1970s, almost literally."

Rewards for failure

The manner of his departure from Unilever was controversial: he got a £1.2m payout despite the failure of his "path to growth" strategy. Under shareholder complaints over "rewards for failure", the company said it had asked him to leave a year earlier than his retirement date, but FitzGerald denies this when he admits that he had fixed a date for leaving long before 2004.

So why did he get the money? "Ahhh," he begins. "The board decided, and it was nothing to do with me, that they would pay me out for one year before my retirement."

Does he regret the manner of his departure? "No. Would I have liked to have departed on an absolute high with everyone saying this man is a genius, of course I would. But life isn't like that. When I look back on my time we achieved 90% of what we set out to. We didn't get top line growth and that was entirely my misjudgment. I was brave enough or stupid enough to set a five-year growth target. Would I do that again? No."

A young daughter means he is now back to juggling babysitting with power dinners. He remains close to his three older children from an earlier marriage. He turned down the job at Reuters at first because his eldest daughter still worked there. "She had spent her entire life trying to do something different from me. She would kill me."

Reuters has slowly steadied itself during the past three years despite large-scale job cuts and bitter competition. He says it is fun but is surprisingly non-committal about his plans to stay on, saying merely that he will have those conversations with the board later this year. "I haven't come to one view or another," he says when I ask whether he will be asking for an extension.

Asked about regrets, he first suggests the recent failure of Manchester United to beat arch-rival Arsenal, before admitting he regrets how long it took him to admit to failure. "There are so many things I got wrong that we could be here a long time," he begins. "I do regret that it took me a long time in my career to be able to admit to failure." In the mid 1990s, this high-flier was damaged by the fallout from Persil Power, the washing powder so effective it destroyed your clothes in the wash. "It did teach me something about humility, the question whether you pick yourself up and pick people around you up."

He has said in a rallying cry to other businessmen of his generation that they will be judged on what they do for Africa and the environment. Is he happy with the way he'll be judged? "I'll never be happy with that," he says. "I try to do what I can but I don't do anything like enough." And with that he realises that he is very late for dinner with influential figures such as the head of a huge oil company and an international investment bank, and he rushes off.


CV

Born September 13 1945.

Education St Munchins College, Corbally, County Limerick, and University College, Dublin (degree in commerce).

Career Spent over 30 years with Unilever, working in Ireland, the Netherlands, the US and the UK. In the early 1980s he ran its foods business in South Africa.

1987 Joined the Unilever board.

1996-2004 Chairman and chief executive.

2003 Joined the board of Reuters as a non-executive director.

2004 Appointed chairman of Reuters.

Also Chairman of the Nelson Mandela Legacy Trust (UK) and co-chairman of the Investment Climate Facility (ICF) for Africa. Chairman of the board of trustees of the British Museum. A member of various advisory bodies, including the President of South Africa's International Investment Advisory Council, as well as a senior adviser to Morgan Stanley International. Awarded an honorary knighthood in 2002 and holds a number of honorary doctorates from US, British and Irish universities.

Family Married to Ingrid, his second wife, with whom he has a five-year-old daughter. He also has three grown-up children.

Interests "Opera and jazz, Irish rugby, supporting Manchester United, running (slowly), playing golf (poorly), creating an exotic garden in Sussex and observing humanity".

No comments: