Kumi Naidoo Naidoo spent four days in a Greenlandic prison after scaling an oil platform owned by Cairn Energy, as part of Greenpeace's "Go Beyond Oil" campaign. He was deported to Denmark where he spent a short time in Danish custody before being released in Amsterdam, Netherlands. He has been a vocal critic of the failure of bodies like the World Economic Forum, to go beyond "system recovery", "system protection and maintenance" instead proposing a system re-design. Kumi Naidoo uses the WEF to amplify environmental messages to business leaders and politicians and lobby for green business practices and transformational changes in the
Kumi Naidoo mass mobilisation, civil disobedience and for violating the state of emergency. This led him to having to go underground before finally deciding to live in exile in England. During this time Naidoo was a Rhodes scholar at the University of Oxford and he eventually earned a PhD in political sociology. Naidoo's doctorate was earned in the late 1990s, after he returned to England from South Africa. He suspended his studies at Oxford to return to South Africa in 1990 in order to conduct literacy campaigns after the release of Nelson Mandela from prison and Mandela's decision to run for president