A chance at renewal: Nigeria’s coming election

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. In New York, I'm John Fassman.

And in London, I'm Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

After years of COVID restrictions, a wobbly property market and a regulatory clampdown on its tech firms, China's economy is slowly returning to life. But how much that will spill over to other countries is unclear.

And in the early 20th century, Sigmund Freud declined to take part in movies depicting psychotherapy. He thought the risk of sensationalism was too high. Today's filmmakers, not so much, but therapists worry about fictionalizations of their work. First up, though.

At various points in the last few months, I've been traveling across Nigeria as it builds up to presidential and general elections on February 25.

Kenley Salmon is the Economist's West Africa correspondent.

These elections are just exceptionally important. They're an opportunity for renewal, really for the largest country in Africa, the biggest economy and only a democracy since 1999. So a success in these elections would be a really important moment of consolidation. Nigeria is in an extremely difficult moment. Poverty and violence really are rife right across the country. Last year, for example, some 10,000 people were killed by criminal gangs. Terrorists and in fighting with the army. When I was in the Northeast, for example, visiting people in internally displaced persons camps. They told me that they'd fled terrorists in the northeast and now they were struggling with violence between farmers and herders. So these crises really cascade and fall into each other. And Nigerians are poorer today than they were eight years ago at the time of the last handover of power when the outgoing president Muhammadu Buhari took over. He's governed, I think it's fair to say, pretty poorly in his eight years of office. And Nigerians seem to agree. About 90% of them think the country is going in the wrong direction.

So who will Nigerians trust to put the country back on its feet then?

Well, when I travel around the country, one face is looking out at everybody far more often than any other. And that's the 70 year old face of Bola Tinubu of the incumbent All Progressives Congress right across the country. He is there on billboards, on posters. His campaign videos are all over Nigeria. Our Alain today signal our renewed hope for Nigeria. You all know me well. He's a Muslim man from the south of the country, but he hopes that his faith will help him gain support in the mainly Muslim north. But there are plenty of worries about Mr. Tinubu and many worry about his health. He looks increasingly frail on the campaign trail and he's skipped a number of big campaign events. The main alternative, at least traditionally, is the 76 year old Atiku Ababaka of the People's Democratic Party. He's running for the sixth time that if I have the opportunity and you elect me, business trading will pick up again. Mr. Abu Bakr is a wealthy former customs official. He was vice president in 1999. He's a northerner and a Muslim as well, but is representing in the pdp, a party that's typically had more support in the Christian South. But both candidates from these two main parties face real questions over their character. Mr. Tinubu at one point had his assets frozen by the US Government who alleged that some of the money in accounts in his name came from drug trafficking. He reached a settlement with the Americans and forfeited $460,000. While Mr. Abubakar faces allegations from a US Senate report that over $40 million of corporation quote unquote, suspect funds were transferred to America for Mr. Mucker. Now, both candidates, we should be clear, deny any wrongdoing, but these kind of allegations have opened a window perhaps to an unexpected third candidate in this usually two party race. And that's Peter Obi.

And we've spoken before about Mr. Obi in an interview last year as he entered the race. Remind us who he is.

Well, Mr. Obi is a relatively speaking sprightly 61 year old. He's a former governor of Anbra state in the southeast and a trader and he's representing the rather less well known Labour Party of Nigeria.

The Labour Party has the best presidential candidates.

Peter Obi is the only presidential candidate. He's a Christian, but owes his popularity in part to Nigerians desperation for an alternative to the sort of ego laden politicians that typically have ruled the country. Many voters, particularly young ones, are attracted to his frugal, rather more energetic style and certainly see him as less corrupt than his rivals. In the two times I've met him, Mr. Obi's been strikingly approachable, keen to chat, ask me how I'm doing. Hi, how are you? Very well, thank. I just want to ask how you're feeling about the campaign.

Well, feeling great about the passion of.

Nigerian people on all this.

And I wish the momentum.

I see your own. It's this direct and and somewhat more informal style that I think has voters telling pollsters that they favor him.

And how is his campaign going?

Well, to try to find out more about Obi's chances, I clambered aboard a private jet in Abuja, the capital of Nigeria, to fly down to Ondo in the southwest of Nigeria with the campaign for a day of rallies and events. He's certainly polling very well in his stronghold in the southeastern states of Nigeria, particularly again with young people. And it seemed that younger people down in Ondo in the southwest were also pretty enamored with him. He's also gathering support from luminaries elsewhere. One blue clad woman named Aisha Yasufu, who's well known for being one of the co founders of the Bring Back Our Girls movement, came to the campaign with Mr. Ovi and hyped up the crowd on his behalf.

Let me tell you something. The poly units are the new protest grounds.

And at a town hall with students, she again leapt in to urge students in a Q and A session to ask him tougher questions. That kind of opportunity to scrutinize candidates directly for Nigerians is pretty rare in Nigerian electorate campaigns. And it's another thing that helps him stand out from his rivals. That said, Obi II has faced concerns over his character after he appeared in the Pandora Papers, a large set of financial leaks for owning an undeclared offshore company in the British Virgin Islands, which is a tax haven. He insisted the money in offshore companies was earned well before he entered Politics. But his rivals say, look, these young supporters are really just keyboard warriors. They claim many of them are not registered to vote, that this is a sort of paper army on Twitter. But supporters at a big rally in Ondo were hanging off balconies to hear every word, and Obi shouted out to them exactly. To ask, have you got your voter cut? The response was a forest of hands hitting the sky. But despite this enthusiasm, it is, I think, fair to say that Mr. Obi's path to victory is pretty narrow. His southeast base, where he's overwhelmingly popular, has substantially fewer registered voters than any other region. And Mr. Obi remains pretty weak in much of the northeast and northwest. So weak, in fact, that he may not clear even 25% in those states, which is a problem given in Nigeria. Candidates need not just plurality of votes, but to get over 25% in two thirds of the states. His best hope is probably that young urbanites turn out in such extraordinary numbers, based on the surge in enthusiasm in cities, particularly in the south, that it might push him into what would be Nigeria's first ever presidential runoff.

So you're painting Mr. Obi as somewhat of an outsider chance on this, which means the favor remains with one of the other candidates you mention.

It should be said that at the moment, Obi has a clear lead in the polls, but I think the incumbent party of Tinubu really does have the clearest path to victory. The APC. His party controls most of Nigeria's powerful governorships. Mr. Tinubu would expect to win handsomely in the southwest, which is where his power base has always been. And he hopes that his Muslim faith will see him pick up plenty of votes in the north as well. So his path appears kind of more obvious. However, it should be said that as the representative of the current party in power, he has a steep road to climb, as voters might blame him for some of the many woes besetting Nigeria, including, very recently, another bout of fuel shortages. Mr. Abubakar, the other main candidate, faces, I think, a more imposing set of hurdles. He would typically hope to do well in the south, but Mr. Obi is going to eat up lots of those votes.

And what about the election itself? You expect it to be free, clear, open, a fair fight?

Well, certainly running smooth elections across Nigeria's 176,000 polling stations is a herculean task. And worryingly, local officers of INEC, the electoral body, have been attacked more than 100 times in the last three years. Part of that sort of spectre of violence that that really hovers over most of the country. And some worry about even darker prospects. Coyote Fayemi, who's a former APC governor but also a civil military relations scholar, worried to me, unprompted about the chances of a coup. And there are those in the system.

And out of the system who feel.

That none of the candidates in the running now would be good for the.

Country instead of allowing the people to decide, they want to preempt the people.

And I should say he wasn't the only well connected Nigerian public figure to raise that prospect to me.

And so how worried are you then that that's what comes to pass?

Thankfully, I think the chances of an outright coup really are pretty unlikely, not least because it would just be extremely hard to pull off. And actually I'm more optimistic about these elections in Nigeria, at least how they'll be run. Yes, there are perennial risks of intimidation. Nigerians talk a lot about vote buying. But this time around there's a new electoral reform act in place that has required biometric registration. It involves results being sent electronically from polling stations to the center where they're summed up. And that all makes it harder to rig the results pretty probably than ever before. We also expect to see almost certainly more Nigerians voting this time round than ever before. Young people are out and enthused in huge numbers, and that was evident very much in the rallies that I've attended. People I've spoken to say this is an unprecedented awakening. Now, whether that is enough for Mr. Obi, who hopes to draw a lot of his support from those young people, I think very much remains to be seen. But a big boost in turnout and elections that are run with more rigor and a closer eye from the electoral body are I think would frankly be wonderful news for Nigerian democracy.

Thanks very much for your time, Kenley.

Thank you.

China has enthusiastically shaken off its stringent pandemic era restrictions and has been letting the world know that it's once again open for business. Last month, Vice Premier Liu he, the country's economic czar, launched a charm offensive at Davos. He also met with U.S. treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, who said she hopes to visit China at some point. American treasury officials were all set to visit this month until a diplomatic incident over a Chinese surveillance balloon got in the way. The rest of the world is embracing China's great reopening, but it's far from certain that it will bring instant economic gains. Outside the country.

China has been handling really four challenges.

Simon Cox is the Economist's China Economics editor.

It's had this trade war with the United States. It's had a massive slowdown in its all important property market. It's had its own regulatory tightening on some big tech firms. That has scared a lot of the entrepreneurs in China. And it's also had this ongoing battle with COVID And so right now, that exit wave, as people call it, seems to be coming to an end even faster than people anticipated. And so the economy is now trying to stagger back onto its feet.

But it was on its feet for a good long while during the pandemic, right?

Yeah. So you can divide the pandemic experience of China really into two parts, the sort of pre omicron and post omicron. So before the Omicron variant, which was highly transmissible but not quite so severe, China pursued this very tough zero COVID policy with some success. It managed to beat back Delta, it managed to beat back some of the earlier variants, and that meant that it kept its factories going when a lot of the rest of the world was struggling. In particular some of its arrival manufacturing centers in Asia were dealing with outbreaks. And at the same time, of course, during that lockdown period, a lot of people around the world were spending on goods rather than services. So they were spending on things that would help them work from home or keep them occupied during long spells spent at home, rather than spending on restaurants or entertainment. And that was great for China because it's a manufacturing center, makes a lot of those goods, electronic appliances, for example, or of course, a lot of the emergency gear that people were wearing. And so exports actually performed spectacularly, especially in 2021, I think they grew almost 30% in dollar terms.

I'd like to come back to exports in a minute, but for starters, now that China's opening up, let's talk about domestic spending. How does that look in China and how will it affect China's overall economic health?

So domestic spending is trying slowly to recover, in particular consumption, retail spending, spending on catering, restaurants, entertainment, all of that is beginning to pick up. But it's still a long way from where it would be if China had not pursued this zero COVID policy and indeed if it hadn't had a pandemic to battle. Confidence has been dented and people are a little bit cautious about splashing out, even now that they have an opportunity to do so. And property has also suffered woefully over the past year. It's this early signs that it's beginning to turn. But there too, they're coming back from quite a deep hole.

Let's Come back to exports. What is the outlook there now that the world is starting to open up?

Well, it's a bit paradoxical, you might think, now that China has reopened its borders, now that people can move around the world, salespeople can go and visit their clients, you might think that exports would do really well, even better. But actually they're quite likely to fall this year in dollar terms. People are actually quite pessimistic about exports, and that's for a couple of reasons. One is that China's reopening has rekindled investor enthusiasm. So foreign investors buying up Chinese shares, and that has put upward pressure on China's currency. And so the currency has become more expensive, and that makes its exporters less competitive. The other thing, of course, that's happened is that the rest of the world is battling a slowdown partly engineered by central banks who are worried about inflation. So that has dented demand in some of China's big markets. And of course, because the rest of the world has learned to live with COVID for some time now, that swing in spending towards goods and away from services that I described for the early part of the pandemic, that's gone into reverse. People are going out again and spending rather less on goods for their homes.

And what does all of that mean? If China's exports are weak, what does that mean for the global economic outlook?

One question many people ask is how much will China contribute to global growth and how it's reopened? And really, there are two kinds of answers to that question. The first, you can just look at China itself. It's a big part of global GDP for a period. It'll grow really quite quickly as it recovers, and so it will contribute just mathematically quite a lot to global growth. The more interesting question is how much will China contribute to the rest of the world's growth? And there it's a bit more of a mixed picture. Certainly some places will benefit from the revival in Chinese tourism. For example, Hong Kong, where I'm based, will benefit. Thailand will benefit. And also as imports pick up, countries that supply commodities to China will benefit. So you can think of copper coming from Chile, Peru, you can think of oil from the major oil exporters. But of course, many other parts of the world import those same commodities.

And.

And so now China's coming back into the market, it could make life a bit more difficult for them. The increase in gas prices in particular will be worrying people in Europe.

And what about the other way around? How are things in the rest of the world economy going to impact China.

Many parts of the world are now battling inflation, and their central banks are trying to engineer a slowdown in their economies in order to reduce price pressure. And so if those central banks see a Chinese reopening contributing to fast global growth faster than they wanted, they'll try and offset it by raising interest rates or by lowering less quickly. So in some ways, the contribution China makes to the rest of the world might be offset by central banks who are keen to keep inflation under control.

So China's reintegration isn't necessarily an economic boost across the board, at least not straight away.

Yeah. So in a way, China's reopening poses two paradoxes. There's the paradox that people, people are now free to move, but exports will disappoint. The other paradox is that China growing faster may in fact cause the rest of the world to try and slow things down.

All right, Simon, thanks so much for your time today.

Thanks, Dom. My pleasure.

One night, after finally convincing my two year old twins to go to sleep, I turned on Netflix and came across Stutz.

Imogen White writes about culture for the Economist.

The blurb for the new documentary was not especially inspiring, with something about candid conversations and life experiences. But I was determined to not make any more decisions. That evening, I clicked play.

I love you, dude. Cut.

Oh, you guys will film me?

Why do you think I'm making a doc on you?

The film documents the relationship between Jonah Hill, an American actor, and his psychiatrist, Phil Stutz. Overall, I found it instructive and moving. I even shed a few tears when Mr. Hill and Mr. Stutz discussed their experiences of grief.

Everybody needs help in moving forward and.

What you're doing is you're giving out.

The signal to the world, I need.

You because I can't do this by myself.

Yet there was something about it that made me uncomfortable. How can the rules of the psychological profession be adhered to once a camera is turned on? What about confidentiality? And with the cameras there, does the whole ritual not become performative and a little bit fake? But I was surprised to learn that these reality type shows are not new. In reporting my piece in the Economist, someone told me about three approaches to psychotherapy, later dubbed the Gloria tapes, which was released nearly 60 years ago in 1964.

Well, I'm.

Right now I'm nervous, but I feel.

More comfortable the way you're talking in a low voice. And I don't feel like you'll be.

So harsh on me in it. A 31 year old divorcee was filmed receiving treatment from three different therapists. Are you a little girl? Says one psychoanalyst, who berates her and calls her a phony.

That is a phony because it's a trick.

It's a gimmick to crawl into a.

Corner and wait there until somebody comes to your rescue. But fictional representations are how you see therapy on screens most often. In fact, you could easily write a book length cultural history of psychiatry in film and television from Frasier.

You know, many of my patients find it easier to open up if they're.

Lying down to Good Will Hunting.

Will has an attachment disorder. Is it all that stuff? Is that why I broke up with Skylah?

I didn't know you had.

But psychiatrists and psychoanalysts have long been queasy about their work being depicted on screen, fearing sensationalising something deeply personal and private. In 1924, a Hollywood producer offered Sigmund Freud $100,000, around 1.7 million today, to work on a project about great love stories in history. Freud declined. Freud thought filmmaking and therapy were best kept apart. There have, however, been some pretty memorable depictions of therapy in film over the years. In Alfred Hitchcock's 1945 film Spellbound, Ingrid Berman plays a psychoanalyst trying to figure out whether her new colleague and love interest is a murderer suffering from amnesia. Don't you see that you're imagining all this? You insist without proof that you're a murderer, whoever you are, it's a guilt complex that speaks for you, a guilt fantasy that goes way back to your childhood. And in One Flew over the cuckoo's nest from 1975, Dean Brooks, the real life boss of the psychiatric hospital where the film was made, played a small role as a doctor at the fictional institution.

Tell me, do you think there's anything.

Wrong with your mind?

Really?

Not a thing, Doc. I'm a goddamn marvel of modern science.

Commissioners and television executives have not shared Freud's concerns. But while the therapist client relationship has always been a staple that exists, it seems a wave of films and television shows exploring psychotherapy are cropping up now. For example, there's last year's the Patient, a thriller series starring Steve Carell, who plays a therapist whose client locks him in a basement and demands to be cured of his murderous compulsions.

I have a compulsion to kill people.

Successful therapy requires a safe environment without anything like fear hanging over every session.

There's also Apple's newest comedy, Shrinking. It stars Jason Segel as a therapist who begins telling clients exactly what he thinks.

I think I can help people if.

I get my hands A little bit dirtier.

Sounds so unethical. Your husband is emotionally abusive. Leave him.

And there's plenty more in the pipeline before a limited series is in the works at Apple TV and will star Billy Craig Bristol as a child psychiatrist. And a film starring Anthony Hopkins called Freud's Last Session will begin production soon. But why is it that so many depictions of therapy are popping up on screens now? Firstly, I think part of it is that writers have discovered that watching a person in therapy is delightfully voyeuristic, even when it's a fictional character. But I think another reason is the therapist's usefulness as a means of storytelling. Not only can the encounter between an analyst and patient provide colour and context, but the therapist can also serve as the character who holds the metaphorical marionette strengths that orchestrate the plot. The conversations they have give us access to otherwise hidden motivations and the feelings of a character. Therapy sessions can also provide a moment of epiphany for a protagonist. For the viewer, the revelatory feeling can echo the satisfaction felt when a detective solves a crime.

It's not your fault. Oh, my God.

But today, just like Freud a century ago, therapists are often uneasy about the fictionalization of their work. As one British psychotherapist told me, good therapy does not make good drama. She hopes that audiences are astute enough to know when something is exaggerated for dramatic purposes. But she's most concerned by portrayals in which an inept professional's treatment is ineffective. For example, the Responder, a BBC drama from last year, featured a friendly but useless therapist who treated her job like a checklist.

I want to believe in you, that.

You can help me.

All right, we will.

We'll try something different.

But on the other hand, there are occasional examples of good therapy. The counselor I spoke to thinks the Sopranos, for instance, provides an exemplary depiction of therapy.

What kind of mental stuff would cause a backache? With some people, the pain is caused by more responsibility than they can handle.

Tony Soprano's therapist, Jennifer Malfi, gives him wise counsel and understands his nature. And their conversations also work wonderfully as that narrative device. They help connect the plotlines and give us insights into Tony's interior life and his stresses, like dealing with his mother.

It's been a long odyssey with your mother, hasn't it? Oh, these last 500 years just seemed to race by.

The terrible therapists are sadly more common, though. And even the more respectful documentary depictions of therapy, like Jonah Hill's Stutz, can be problematic to the real thing. Professional boundaries are muddled and confidentiality is obliterated. Despite these ethical questions, the shrink will continue to appeal to screenwriters, producers and audiences alike. Thanks to the pandemic and the economic downturn, viewers are both more unhappy and more open about that unhappiness. According to the medical journal The Lancet, in 2020, depression and anxiety increased by more than 25% globally, and in 2010, a fifth of British people said they had turned to a council. By 2020, a third said they had. Perhaps peeking inside a fictional consultation room may inspire some viewers to hop onto the couch themselves. And while it might not be as dramatic as it seems on tv.

Oh.

My God, that's probably a good thing.

I can't go into details on this one.

That's fine.

But I will say this my uncle.

Adds to my general stress level.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. The show's editors are Chris Impey and Jack Gill. Our deputy editor is John Joe D. Our sound engineer is Will Rowe. Our senior producers are Sam Westrin and Rory Galloway. Our creative producer is William Warren. Our producers are Alize, Jean Baptiste and Kevin Kaynors and assistant producer Barkley Bram. We had extra production help this week from Emily Elias, Margaret Khedifa and Sara Larnjuk. We'll all see you back here on Monday.

Sa.