Baba Go Slow: Nigeria’s President gets another term

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist radio. I'm Anne McElrovoy, in for Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the event shaping your world. A spate of deaths on Mount Everest has raised concern about overcrowding on the world's most popular punishing slopes. Less experienced climbers trying to reach the peak face a queue for selfies at the spot first conquered by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay. One of our data journalists has been looking at whether the recent tragedies are an exception or a worrying trend. Two English clubs, Liverpool and Tottenham, will battle it out in the final of the Champions League. That's Europe's most prestigious tournament. Both rank as comeback kids of the sport. And England's Premier League has also seen a number of clubs emerge from the doldrums to delight their fans and slay some giants. But first, today Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari begins his second term. The former military ruler was first elected head of State in 2015.

You voted for change and now change has come.

But change was slow to arrive and at times for the worse. His economic policies turned a drop in oil prices into a recession. Nigerians are poorer today than they were four years ago. In spite of his tanking popularity, Mr. Buhari beat businessman Atsiku Abubakr in this year's presidential race.

I assure you that no Nigerian will regret voting us into office and we will continue to improve the situation, security, economy and fighting corruption. Thank you very much indeed.

Thank you very much.

Turnout was low and the election was marred by violence and by vote buying. As Mr. Buhari embarks on a new term in office, will he manage to improve on the first and lose the nickname it earned him?

After Muhammadu Buhari was sworn in in 2015, Nigerians started calling him Baba Go Slow. And the reason they did that was because he was just so lethargic.

Jonathan Rosenthal is our Africa editor.

It took him about four months to appoint a cabinet and to start doing anything. He came in for a lot of criticism. But when one looks back on term, perhaps the fact that he was so slow was not so terrible because many of his policies were actually doing more harm to Nigeria than good.

But what would be examples of those? What should he have gone even slower at?

He had some bad luck when Mr. Buhari came in. Oil prices had just crashed in 2014, so there was an oil price shock. But he then turned that in the space of two years into a full blown recession by, among other things, trying to defend the local currencies pegged to the dollar. So he had an overvalued currency. He then tried to turn all good things but going about it in the wrong way. He tried to stimulate Nigerian manufacturing, but the way he did it was by banning the import or effectively banning the import of a whole range of things, from famously, toothpicks to wheelbarrows.

It's such an oil rich country. That must be some sort of advantage. What's he been doing about that?

Mr. Bahari's record on petrol subsidies is just really a lost opportunity. Nigeria produces a lot of oil, but it doesn't refine very much of it. So it sends out oil and brings back petrol and it then sells it very cheaply. So cheaply, in fact, that it is cheaper to buy petrol in Nigeria than it is in Saudi Arabia. It's about half the price per liter at the pump in Nigeria compared to the US and that costs the state an absolute fortune. It spends between half and 1% of GDP subsidizing petrol prices at the pump. And to put that into perspective, that's more than it spends on things like health and almost as much as what it spends on education.

You've reported from Nigeria many times during this presidency. What are the effects of it that you've seen yourself?

So when one travels up to the north of Nigeria, the Kind of failures of this government are the most apparent. I've been to villages, villages with 6,000 people where there is no school. These kids are learning to recite the Koran and that's it. And that shows up in the statistics. Nigeria has more school age children who are not attending school than any other country in the world. And it shows up in the health statistics where in some northern states, one in five children don't make it to their fifth birthday.

Mr. Bihari's in his mid-70s. Does he look likely to change as he moves into his next term?

Sadly, there are no signs that Mr. Bahari is learning from the failures of his first term. The policies that he's announcing are really continuations of the policies that he's run since 2015. His central bank governor, who's been widely judged by outside investors to have been a failure, has been appointed for an unprecedented second term in office. So I think most Nigerians are expecting more of the same.

Something else that's been in the news sporadically from Nigeria has been Boko Haram, the terror movement. Has he been able to make a dent in that?

Security's been one of the great disappointments of Mr. Buhari's term. He came in as a former military man promising to restore security. And for the first few years of his time in office, he managed to push Boko Haram out of the major towns and cities. But what we've seen over the past six to 12 months has been an absolute resurgence of Boko Haram. They have been attacking Nigerian military bases, overrunning them, stealing weapons, and really just gaining strength. And without a massive change in strategy, one sees the Nigerian army on the back foot.

Listening to all that you're saying just makes us wonder how he managed to get a second term at all. To what do you ascribe the election victory?

So unfortunately, Nigerians were not spoiled for choice. In the past election. They had two old men. Mohammedu Buhari and Atiku Abubakar are running. Both have been associated with former governments. The One thing that Mr. Buhari could claim and has a lot of public support for is his. His stance against corruption. He is seen as personally not being corrupt. And although his government has had limited success in bringing down corruption, he still is seen as the clean candidate.

So if you had to choose one or two things that Mr. Bihari could improve in this second term to offset some of a not very distinguished record, what would you go for on the economy?

The thing that he needs to do is to just trust Nigerians. They have Enormous talent. We've seen the kinds of Nollywood art and film production that has come out of there. Once seen, they're incredibly driven, they start businesses. And the key thing that Mr. Buhari should be doing is not trying to drive a sort of statist, centrally directed economy, bossing things around as he used to in the military, but actually just unleash Nigerians own creativity and let them get on with it.

Jonathan, thanks very much.

Thank you.

So we looked up and there was the summit just 30, 40ft above us. So we cut up onto the summit and stepped on it.

It's more than 65 years since Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay became the first people to reach the world's highest peak and safely return.

I think my first reaction was definitely one of relief and relief that we'd found the summit, for one thing, and relief that we were there.

There's no shortage of those who want to follow in their footsteps, but not all of them make it back.

I came across the first body that I saw just outside of Camp 3 on my way up and, you know, nothing really had prepared me for that. And that, that had quite a profound effect on me.

In 2017, Holly Budge attempted to make it to the top of Everest.

This guy was an Australian guy who had died the day before. And so he was lying on a steep slope attached to the rope that I was on, so you had to sort of step over him. And then I saw quite a few other bodies on the way up. Some of them looked like they'd been there longer than others. Some of them were in quite dramatic positions. And it was really quite surreal, the whole thing. And I think it's a very stark reminder of how fine that line is between life and death.

The climbing season for Everest opened at the beginning of the month. In the few weeks since, 11 people have died or are reported missing. Last year, five lost their lives. But over the long term, the mountain has become safer to climb.

Well before the first summit in 1953 with the Hillary and Norgay Expedition, the the death rate prior was about 7%. And since it has dwindled pretty much every decade to where at this point, only 1% of people who try to climb Everest end up dying.

Elliot Morris is a data journalist with the Economist.

So climbing as a whole has gotten easier because technology has advanced. Primarily, climbers use better compact oxygen than they used to. It flows at about twice the rate down. Suits are also much warmer now. They help prevent frostbite and help climbers be more comfortable, which helps Prevent exhaustion. But on Everest in particular, climbers now can rely on a track of rope and ladder from Base Camp to the summit of the mountain, laid primarily by the high skilled Sherpas who work there.

11 people dying in the space of a couple of weeks. That hardly suggests that Everest is a safe or an easy climb. So do the events of this season mean that it's becoming less safe?

Right. Well, while this year's deaths are tragic, they don't seem to mean that the mountain is becoming that unsafe. A record number of climbing permits were issued for this climbing season. So although there has been more deaths on the mountain, it appears as such there will be more total people climbing the mountain as well. I mean, that means that the death rate has been held to about 1%, about where it's been for the past decade.

And what do you make of what has been happening recently?

Well, it's tricky. On the one hand, there are certainly more inexperienced climbers on the mountain. There's sort of the CEO types that come to sort of climb for their ego, maybe post pictures online. And then there are experienced climbers who are implicated by that.

So there's extra risk from these inexperienced climbers.

There's both extra risk from them climbing the mountain. But this year was also a bit of an aberration. The climbing window, the summit window, you know, there's about two weeks in May was reduced because of bad weather. And Sherpas weren't able to sort of line the mountain with the rope that they were typically used to until very late. And that sort of exacerbated the entire situation.

One climber has posted an incredible image. It's a queue snaking its way to that famous summit. People waiting for their photo opportunity at the top. What exactly is happening up there?

Right, so on your way up the mountain, there's this fixed rope that you get attached to so you don't fall off. And this time, because the summit window was so compressed, about 250 people were climbing the mountain when that photo was taken. And they were sort of all stacked up there waiting for their turn at the top. And I think they get about 10 minutes on some cases. If they're lucky, they'll get half an hour up there. But the longer they spend in this so called death zone, the more dangerous it gets. And when they're in this death zone, they can't breathe without oxygen. And if they run out of their oxygen, well then the trouble really sets in. And so they really need a fast turnaround or else they can find themselves on some serious difficulty getting down on.

The summit of Everest.

Very exciting, very long day.

Holly Budge was part of an experienced two person team which did reach the summit of Everest. But it's absolutely incredible to be up here. What an amazing experience. Obviously got to get down safe now. What she saw on her descent disturbed her even more than what she'd seen on the climb up.

The people that I saw coming back down from the summit, some of those guys couldn't support their own body weight. Some of them had sherpas roped to them front and back. So two Sherpas to one climber. And the Sherpas told me that they had to hide behind this, these climbers on the summit to support them for their summit photo because they were barely conscious. It became unclear which was a dead body and which was a near dead body that suddenly moved. You know, you'd see an arm or a leg move that started to get a bit freaky when you really were wondering who was dead and who was alive.

So, Elliot, how might this be fixed and what should be done to limit this potential loss of life?

Well, to climb Everest now, you have to have a permit from the Nepalese government. And so far there's no quota, there's no restriction on the number they grant to interested parties. Certainly limiting the number of the people on the mountain is one step. And they could also sort of control the flow of people stringing themselves along that rope near the end, sort of mediate the number of people climbing at the same time.

And is climbing Everest still the achievement it once was? Given this context, does it still have that cachet and kudos?

It certainly doesn't seem like it does. You know, when Norgay and Hillary summited the mountain in 1953, that certainly was an accomplishment. But with summit rates approaching 80%, it's more of a commercialized string up the top than a challenging climb. But let's not get away from the fact that people who are very devoted to hard climbing can certainly pave their new routes on Everest and sort of create a harder climb. They don't all go the uber commercialized sort of CEO route to the top.

Thanks very much, Elliot.

Thank you.

This weekend, two English football teams, Liverpool FC and Tottenham Hotspur, are going head to head in the Champions League final, Europe's most prestigious tournament. And this evening, a different two English teams, Arsenal and Chelsea, are in the second tier Europa League final. England might think of itself as the home of football, but the club game hasn't always been as Triumphant.

In around 2007 2008, English clubs were really the top of the world.

James Tozer is a data journalist at the Economist.

Manchester United, Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool were dominating everyone around them. They had the best players and it looked like the future would be rosy for many years to come. But in the years since then, English clubs have really fallen away, which has been a surprise given how much wealthier they've become than everyone else. So Arsenal, Manchester United and Chelsea have all sort of fallen by the wayside. And it's only recently that we've had three clubs who. Well, certainly two clubs who traditionally haven't done that well. Tottenham and Manchester City have emerged from nowhere and Liverpool have gone from being once the jewel of British football to nowhere and then back again.

Manchester City has been one of the big stories of these years. What's happened there?

Absolutely. They've won the Premiership in four of the last eight years. A lot of their success has been thanks to an inflow of money. They're owned by the royal family of Abu Dhabi and they've now overtaken Manchester United as the big team in that city.

You mentioned money. Is this all really about money? Who's got it and who's got more of it than someone else?

A lot of it is, yes. Manchester City are now the richest team in the world. Liverpool have been rescued from the brink of bankruptcy in 2008, and they're now one of the biggest spending clubs. So it's not just about how much money these clubs are spending, it's how efficiently they're spending it. And that's especially true of Liverpool, Manchester City and Tottenham. Who are these three clubs who are dominating now? In fact, when you look at English clubs as a whole, the vast majority of them are underperforming, given how wealthy they are. And I think one of the things that has been especially problematic for them is that European clubs know that English clubs are wealthier and they can fleece them a bit more. In the transfer market. They're spending a little bit too much money, especially on older players who are already quite well known.

So how are they spending the money? Differently.

So the crucial thing that these three clubs are doing is that they're spending on younger players. They've worked out a player's peak in their late 20s and they're now signing players in their early 20s. Two really good examples of this are Kevin de Bruyne, who's Manchester City's arguably best player, and Mohamed Salah, who's Liverpool's best player. But they purchased both of them when they were in their early 20s and now they've matured into the stars of the league.

And are there also teams who don't go around energetically signing up new players? What happens to them?

So Tottenham are a fascinating example of this. In fact, they're the first club in Premier League history not to sign a single player during a season. They realised they already had a core of very young, talented players and they figured, let's stick with them. And it's worked out for them brilliantly. They're in the Champions League final for the first time this weekend.

Alright then, cut to the chase. Who do you think is going to win?

It's hard to look past Liverpool for the Champions League final, given that they've got slightly better players, they spent slightly more. But it would be a hell of a story if Tottenham managed to pull it off.

Thanks very much, James.

Thank you.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple Podcasts and you can subscribe to the economist@exterator.com radio. Offer 12 issues for $12 or 12 of your British pounds. See you back here tomorrow. It.