Never-ending storeys: rebuilding Turkey

In 1946, CARE delivered the world's first care packages to Europeans devastated and hungry from 6 years of war. 80 years later, this spirit lives on. The fisherman who saved his neighbours during a cyclone. The woman who guided her colleague through a firefight to safety. The girl who challenged the elders who told her she couldn't play soccer. Yet the question lingers: Who cares? You do. And so do we. Join us at care.org/whocares. Scaling requires infrastructure, talent, and policy certainty. The UK's Modern Industrial Strategy delivers all three and more through a 10-year plan. With £10 trillion in capital, world-class universities, and unrivaled market access, the UK is engineered for growth. Start your investment journey at business.gov.uk/growth.

Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm Jason Palmer.

And I'm Ora Ogunbiyi. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

Policymakers, NGOs, and others endlessly fret about explosive population growth in sub-Saharan Africa. But they seem to be overlooking data that suggest Africa's baby boom is slowing in a demographic transition just like the one that happened in Asia.

And in Nazi Germany, the White Rose group thought of themselves as the nation's conscience. But to Nazi leaders, they were propagandists spreading treasonous leaflets. We reflect on the life of Trausl of Renz, the last of the group's members. But first, it's been just over 2 months since Turkey, along with neighboring Syria, was hit by 2 devastating earthquakes. More than 50,000 people died and over 3 million others have been displaced. Now Turkey needs to find a way to urgently replace the affected homes and buildings. But with a faltering economy and a weak currency, it will be a daunting task. And with an election right around the corner, President Erdoğan is under pressure to show results sooner rather than later.

Turkey needs a massive rebuild.

Piotr Zelewski is The Economist's Turkey correspondent.

It's going to be hugely expensive. It could take years before the country has replenished its destroyed housing stock.

Now remind us, just how much damage are we talking about here?

We're talking about a pair of earthquakes that destroyed or leveled a number of towns and including large cities, across an area of about 100,000 to 110,000 square kilometers. And that's the size of Bulgaria, roughly speaking. Over 300,000 buildings are destroyed, damaged beyond repair, or slated for demolition. The amount of rubble to be collected is 200 million tons. That's roughly 10 times the amount of rubble that covered Warsaw at the end of the Second World War.

And how is the reconstruction process going? Is the government making efforts to rebuild these affected areas?

You could say the reconstruction process is underway, and that's to say that the foundations for some buildings, some hospitals, have been laid. But the task is enormous and Turkey's president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has pledged to rebuild the affected areas from the ground up, and he's pledged to do so within a year. Inshallah, that timetable does not seem very realistic. Assuming Mr. Erdoğan survives the upcoming presidential elections in Turkey, which are set for May 14th, he faces a very daunting task. Again, construction has begun on the outskirts of some towns and part of the rubble has been removed. But the amount of construction taking place right now is just a fraction of what will be needed over the next few years. In places like Antakya, a city of about 400,000 people, only about half of the rubble has been cleared and parts of the old city are basically impenetrable, even on foot, due to the debris that has piled up.

Okay, you've painted quite a bleak picture here, but with such widespread destruction, how much could all this rebuilding cost?

Well, there have been a number of estimates over the past month or so. The latest and seemingly the most credible one is courtesy of Turkey's Strategy and Budget Office. Which puts the cost of reconstruction, economic damage at $104 billion. Now, some of that amount, but only a fraction, will probably be financed by the private sector, but the rest will have to come from the public purse and from the outside world. Coming up with the additional financing will be a challenge for the government, especially this government. The reason is that while Turkey can still borrow on international markets, it can only borrow at a high price, with foreign investors expecting yields of about 9% on dollar-denominated Turkish bonds. The government could also force domestic banks to buy treasury securities to help fund the reconstruction, but this could leave domestic lenders badly overstretched and still cover only a fraction of the needs.

And as if finding the money isn't hard enough, this borrowing will also come at a cost. What could that mean for Turkey's economy in the longer term?

Well, this would imply a major strain on the public purse. You know, the budget deficit even before the earthquake was expected to come in at about 3.5% this year. Analysts expect that the cost of reconstruction, even when spread out over the next, let's say, 3, 5 years, will add at least a couple of percentage points to that figure. And then there's the additional outlay of mitigating the impact of future disasters. And this is the case especially in Istanbul, which is bracing for a major earthquake over the next few years or so. Quake-proofing The city's aging housing stock, including the 90,000 or so buildings that are most at risk of collapse, could cost upwards of $19 billion according to the city's mayor.

Given the extent of the ruin and those rather eye-watering figures, how long do you reckon this reconstruction journey will take?

The estimate of analysts and experts based here say that this will take at least 3 years, maybe 5, maybe even more. So obviously far more than the year that Erdoğan has referred to. I mean, in places like Antakya, the cleanup alone will take another 6 months, according to the local head of the Chamber of Architects. So, you know, the length of the process and the scale of the destruction is such that it might actually depress local demand for new housing because, well, people, they're not likely to wait for years before housing is available. And so there is the risk that people— and an analyst I spoke to mentioned a figure of at least 1 million people simply leaving the area for good. But whatever the case, it's going to be a very long and very costly process to get the country back on its feet.

Now, earlier you mentioned that there's an election coming up. If Mr. Erdoğan doesn't deliver on his promise to rebuild in a year, how could this affect his political prospects?

Well, Erdoğan at this point doesn't have a year. He has only a month left before elections. So people will judge his performance on the basis of what will have happened between February 6th, the date of the earthquake, and May 14th, the date of the elections, and whether he receives a mandate to govern Turkey for another 5 years will to a large extent depend on that. Even if he is to lose the elections, and at this point he is trailing in the polls behind the opposition's main candidate, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, his successor would face an equally daunting task. And the opposition too has overpromised. But Mr. Erdoğan, especially given the situation in the polls, must be feeling the pressure. In late March, he presided over what was billed as a groundbreaking ceremony for a new hospital outside Antakya. And it turned out only a few days later that the tender for the hospital in question had not yet taken place. So Erdoğan does not have much time to deliver and to show results. And for all we know, he might be out of time.

Piotr, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Thank you for having me.

In 1946, CARE delivered the world's first care packages to Europeans devastated and hungry from 6 years of war. 80 years later, this spirit lives on. The fisherman who saved his neighbours during a cyclone. The woman who guided her colleague through a firefight to safety. The girl who challenged the elders who told her she couldn't play soccer. Yet the question lingers: Who cares? You do, and so do we. Join us at care.org/whocares.

In November, the global population passed another milestone: 8 billion, just 11 years after it passed 7 billion. Lots of attention has focused on African countries, with the continent's population expected to nearly triple by the end of the century to 3.4 billion people. Politicians and policymakers across Africa worry about educating and employing, housing and feeding all those people. While populists have stoked fears about a flood of economic migrants and asylum seekers coming from the continent.

The trouble is that's not paying attention to quite a bit of new data that's recently been released.

Kinley Salmon is an Africa correspondent for The Economist.

So this new data suggests actually that Africa's birth rate is falling quite a lot more quickly than expected. There is, of course, you know, plenty of population growth still baked in on the continent, But some experts are looking at this data and thinking this is the beginning of Africa undergoing really the same kind of rapid fertility changes, often known as a demographic transition, that East Asia did.

So let's talk through the numbers here. What were the projections? What are the projections now? What are these sort of rates of decline here?

Well, the UN produces what's often widely considered the most authoritative population projections, and its numbers published last year contain considerably lower estimates for sub-Saharan Africa than the projections it published a decade a year ago. To take kind of one example, for Nigeria, which is Africa's most populous country, it has a population today numbering about 213 million people, and the UN has cut its forecast for population in 2060 by more than 100 million people, down to a projection now of about 429 million. But even these UN projections may not be keeping pace with some of the declines of fertility rates and data that's been released very recently. I mean, looking again at Nigeria, a UN-backed survey that came out a recently using data from 2021 found the fertility rate had fallen to 4.6, down from 5.8 just 5 years earlier. And that kind of a fall to around 4.6 has been corroborated by another survey elsewhere. There are also these trends in parts of the Sahel, south of the Sahara Desert, and also in coastal West Africa, places like Mali, Senegal, where the fertility rate's fallen by about 1 child per woman in just over a decade. Also in neighboring Gambia and in Ghana, So there's quite a bit of movement. Of course, these are still from relatively high rates, but those kind of drops are certainly getting some people in the demographic community to sort of sit up and pay attention now.

And so what's behind this trend?

Well, there are quite a number of factors, but the big obvious proximate cause, if you like, is expanded use and more acceptability of contraceptives. In Nigeria, for example, contraception's gone up from about 11% of the population to 18%, also in the past 5 years. And in Senegal, that's doubled to about a quarter of the population in the past decade. In Kano, a big city in the north of Nigeria, I met Idris Suleiman Abubakar, a gynecologist at the biggest public hospital there.

The common method used is oral contraceptives.

The pill?

Yes, the pill.

And he really emphasized that more people are willing to come to clinics or even just go to a pharmacy and pick up things like the pill, which he mentioned is the most preferred method in that part of Nigeria. Intrauterine devices are also popular as well as injectables.

The problem is acceptability. In the past, there was a little stigma associated with the use, but I can tell you now there is a change. Okay, now we see women who will come and openly say, "I want family planning," unlike in the past where you need to do a lot of counseling to even get—

It used to be the case that women needed a man's approval in order to seek that kind of birth control, but that's no longer the case, which of course makes the whole process a lot easier.

Now, anyone that gets to the family planning clinic requesting for family planning, she is offered family planning because it is her fundamental right.

So that women can just go in and grab whatever it is they prefer that they need.

Yeah, that's right. But there are unfortunately still kind of real barriers to this right across the continent. Stockouts at clinics are common. A woman may have begun a particular form of contraceptive control and then find that they aren't able to continue with it when they next need to refill. There are also occasionally some challenges with the quality of the contraceptives available that Suleymanah Boubacca mentioned. You know, not necessarily the most top-of-the-line IUDs. And sometimes there are issues also where the use of the pill has slightly higher failure rates because at the clinic there isn't as clear instructions or education about how and when to take them. And there are still issues around acceptability, even though they've been improving. That in the past has often been to do with religious stigma. That seems to be changing. Some of the Clerics that I spoke to in Kainuu are now talking about family planning and contraception because they are concerned about whether children are being well looked after in big families. And Mr. Abubakar himself says he's now more worried about the local film industry, you know, stoking fears with plotlines that suggest contraceptives can be dangerous.

They bring a storyline that the woman's reproductive system was damaged because she uses pills. But you'll be shocked at the rate at which people believe such And I think that is a strong negative factor.

So as a result of these challenges around access and use of contraceptives, there is still a lot of variation across Africa in how widespread the use is. In East Africa, rates are much higher. Sometimes more than half of married women are using modern contraception. But in West Africa and Central Africa, tends to be a lot lower.

And what did you hear about all this from mothers, from the women that you spoke to?

I spent quite a bit of time talking with mothers in Northern Nigeria in the outskirts of Kano, and often poorer families. I spoke, for example, with Zainab Abubakar, a 30-year-old mother who makes a living selling charcoal. But there were sort of interesting changes happening according to them as well. She'd come from a big family. She had 11 siblings. How many children do you have?

I think, you know, 2.

2? Okay, would you like to have more or you prefer not?

She said she's okay with the number because things have changed. Yes. What has changed?

That there is high cost of living, people are struggling with even what to eat, and as well as other things.

She was worried about having enough money to make sure her kids get a good education. And of course, having more children can make that more challenging.

So taking all this together, the fertility rate falling faster, as you say, than people had expected, what does that mean, though, in the big picture for African nations more broadly?

Yeah, this is a question that sort of often generates a lot of heat and a lot of conjecture. It's perhaps worth mentioning a couple of things that are often fretted about, but perhaps there aren't actually such big issues about African population growth. Some people worry that the continent is just overcrowded, so this might be great news because it would reduce that problem. But in fact, sub-Saharan Africa isn't particularly overcrowded. It has about 48 people per square kilometer, which is far lower than Britain, for example, which has close to 300. Even taken country by country, Africa's 5 most populous countries are well below Britain's density. But there are, though, you know, some more real benefits to sort of declining population growth. Fertility rates coming down, women having fewer children, often fewer teenage pregnancies. It means greater space between pregnancies for women, which reduces health problems. It also can increase the number of women in the workforce. And economists also get excited about these kind of declines in fertility because it can increase the number of working-age adults in the population relative to the number of children. There's a shift, if you like, in the structure of the population. And so that can give an economic boost. It also means at home, you know, that each child is more likely to get enough food, you know, books and uniforms for school and that kind of thing. And perhaps even at the national level, it can have smaller cohorts each year going into the school system and allow governments to spend a bit more per child. So there's a lot of hope and excitement about these declining fertility rates, but these benefits don't come automatically. Of course, there need to be those investments in education. There need to be jobs for people to enter to have that benefit of more people in the workforce. So falling fertility rates are an opportunity, but not a guarantee of a transformed economy.

Thanks very much for joining us, Kinley.

Thank you.

In German, the leaflets are called Flugblätter, which means flying sheets of paper. On that February morning in 1943, they did exactly that.

Catherine Nixey writes about Britain. This week is sitting in for our obituaries editor, Anne Rowe.

Two students, Hans and Sophie Scholl, had been carrying them in a suitcase. And so in high spirits, or perhaps foolishness, or almost insanity, they had just taken them up to the top of the atrium of Munich University. And then they just thrown them over the balustrade into the atrium below. The reason it was insane was because of what was on the leaflets. These were leaflets that called upon their fellow students to stand up to the Nazis, and they called the Nazis godless, shameless, brainless fools. When the Gestapo finally arrested Traute Lefrenz, they would ask her about those leaflets. And she said, yes, she did understand that they were subversive, but then she says this lovely line, "Oh, it had all seemed so harmless, really, just such nonsense." And in a way, all of this had been harmless at first. Later in Germany, they would become very famous. They were called the White Rose Group. And she would always say, "No, it wasn't an organization. It was just us." It was just a group of friends. It was just my friend Hans, she would say, and his sister Sophie, and some of our other friends. She also always said that she was no hero. I'm just a witness. And the tone of the leaflets was from the beginning very uncompromising. Each leaflet had been written by Hans and another of his friends, and they raged at the Germans for being what as they put it, a shallow, spineless herd of mindless followers. And they're full of these extraordinary phrases. And they raged at the murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews, which had been done, they said, in a most bestial manner. So many of them got involved in this despite the danger. Hans, Trauter later said, had this kind of charisma that attracted people. People just wanted to be around him. He came up with that White Rose title. She was never quite sure why. She would sort of reflect on it later, and she thought that he wanted something that resonated, but she wasn't sure what quite it was resonating with. Maybe something to do with the French Revolution. She thought he had an idea that the aristocrats had put white roses on their banners. The association would later gain other resonances, because when the authorities caught Hans and tried him, they cut his head off with a guillotine too. Traute would always say that she just helped buy paper and envelopes, but there was nothing just really about that then. The Nazis were watching the stationers. Even buying paper put you under suspicion. She'd describe how one January day, just before the incident at Munich University, she and Sophie had just strolled through Ludwigstrasse and It was an unusually warm January. They were delighting in the sun and the warmth, and they'd walked on their way to the stationer's shop. And outside the stationer's shop, there'd been a horse and cart, and Sophie had stroked his neck, and she'd said, "Hey, buddy," to the horse. She'd walked into the stationer's shop, Tretter would always remember, with that same happy face beneath her distinctive cropped bob. In the end, the authorities would cut her head off with a guillotine too. When it came, the end, it all came so fast. On the Thursday, just before Sophie threw those leaflets into the atrium, she'd bumped into Trauter and she'd called out to her and she said, hey, you know those ski boots that you want to borrow? She said, you should just take them. Sophie had told her, just in case I'm not back this afternoon. And she wasn't back that afternoon. The university's caretaker had seen her throw those leaflets He'd caught her, he'd taken her brother as well, and then he'd handed them over to the authorities. After that, things moved very, very quickly. Their trial began on Monday morning. It was over by 1 PM. At 5 PM, Sophie was led to the guillotine. Later, the executioner would say he'd never seen anything like it before. He said she barely flickered an eyelash. A few minutes later, her brother Hans followed her. He was different. Just before the blade hit his neck, he had shouted out, "Long live freedom!" Traute didn't get away with it entirely. She would go to prison for a whole year, but she never complained about it. She would always tersely say, what right did she have to complain? But the leaflets didn't die with her friends' deaths. That was not the end of them. Somehow, a copy of that one that had fallen down into the atrium in Munich found its way out of Germany. Then it was taken to Norway, and then it was taken to Sweden, and then it was taken to England. And everywhere it went, it was copied out and it was distributed and it was handed on, as the students had asked that it would be. And then that July, the RAF got hold of it, and they flew copies of it to Germany, and then they dropped them. And so, for the second time that year, down fell those Flugblätter, down fell those flying pieces of paper. Not in their hundreds this time, or in their thousands. Down fell millions and millions of leaflets over Germany, begging the Germans to fight against the party. Down like snow fell those little flying pieces of paper raging against Hitler. And down into Germany fell the cry, freedom and honor.

Catherine Nixey on Traute LaFrance, who's died at the age of 103.

That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. The show's editors are Chris Impey and Jack Gill, and our deputy editor is John-Joe Devlin. Our sound engineer is Will Rowe. With extra help this week from Saul Rivers. Our senior producers are Sam Westron and Rory Galloway. Our creative producer is William Warren. Our producers are Alizée Jean-Baptiste, Kevin Kainars, Barkley Bram, and Sarah Larniuk, with help this week from Maggie Khadifa and Peter Granitz. We'll all see you back here on Monday.

In 1946, CARE delivered the world's first care packages to Europeans devastated and hungry from 6 years of war. 80 years later, this spirit lives on. The fisherman who saved his neighbours during a cyclone. The woman who guided her colleague through a firefight to safety. The girl who challenged the elders who told her she couldn't play soccer. Yet the question lingers: Who cares? You do, and so do we. Join us at care.org/whocares.