Reuters World News - The aftermath of the quake and the politics of aid

Episode Date: February 9, 2023

We're in Turkey and Syria as hopes fade of finding survivors in the rubble and the clamor for aid crescendos. Against a backdrop of politics and bitter civil war, how will the governments of Tayyip Erdogan and Bashar Assad respond?  And in South Africa, the president is getting ready to give his State of the Nation address. But can he keep the lights on long enough to rescue a flatlining economy? Plus our reporter sits down with Jamie Dimon in Miami to talk interest rates and the flight of rich Wall Streeters from his hometown. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, we're in Turkey and Syria, as hopes fade finding survivors in the rubble and the clamouring for aid crescendos. Against a backdrop of politics and bitter civil war, how will the governments of Recep type Erdogan and Bashar al-Assad respond to the crisis? And in South Africa, the president is getting ready to give his state of the nation's speech. But can he keep the lights on long enough to rescue a flatlining economy? It's Thursday, February 9th. This is Reuters World News, with frontline reporting and insights you can trust in 10 minutes. I'm Kim Vennel in London.

First, the latest headlines from around the world. He's got leopards. Now he wants wings. Ukraine's president, Vladimir Zelensky, is on a tour of Europe in search of better aerial firepower. First stop was London, kicking off only his second trip abroad since the war against Russia began.

Top of his shopping list is combat aircraft, a plea he hammered home in a speech to British lawmakers. Living a British parliament two years ago, I thanked you for delicious English tea. Western countries have so far stopped short of providing planes that could strike deep into Russia. Zelensky's hoping. to change that. His next port of call, an EU summit in Brussels, will give him another chance to get

wings on the agenda. This is my voice recorded by artificial intelligence. Or is this my voice recorded by artificial intelligence? Could you even tell the difference? Everyone is suddenly an expert in AI, except, apparently Google. Their shares lost more than $100 billion in market value, after the ad for their new chatbot showed inaccurate information. Reuters were the first to flag the era where Google's barred chatbot fluffed an answer on satellites. Not a great start to their battle with Microsoft, who hoped to tie in the popular chat GPT with its search engine Bing. So maybe AI isn't ready to replace me just yet. The current now economy, a kind of, is still doing okay.

Jamie Diamond thinks the U.S. economy is doing okay, but has a warning for investors who think inflation is last year's worry. And so I just think people should take a deep breath in this one before they declare victory because a month's number look good. The top JP Morgan boss says he thinks it will be perfectly reasonable for the Fed to raise rates to 5% and wait a while. But I still, you know, I'm quite cautious about this. This is different than circular.

is we've had since World War II. It's far bigger. It's far more important. It's far more explosive. Diamond sat down with U.S. Finance Editor Linan Nguyen Nguyen in Miami. And he had plenty to say about Miami's efforts to lure rich Wall Streeters away from New York City. Diamond recently bought a house there. The born and bred New Yorker said his hometown needed to do more to compete with the Sunshine State. People have to understand about, you know, I'm a New Yorker. I'm born in Britain, New York. I grew up in Jackson and Queens. But I'm giving you an analysis, not a moral or theological thing. People go to where they're wanted.

And you come to Miami, the taxes lower, the weather's good, the arts are good, their restaurants are good, they want business, they're very pro-business. That attracts people. We're all watching the images coming out from Turkey and Syria right now. Bodies being carried across the border in body bags from Turkey to sea. Syria so Syrians can be buried in their homeland. A baby girl is born under the rubble. Miraculously, she's rescued with her umbilical cord still attached. And then we find out her parents are thought to have died. People have lost entire families. The challenges are huge. It's freezing cold and there's not enough specialist equipment. And people are angry.

In Turkey, President Rejip-Type Erdogan is facing an election. amid a crumbling economy, and some survivors are saying his government is not moving fast enough. Sabihar Al-inak has been forced to shelter outside in the snow for two nights. She's in the Turkish city of Malatia. She says the state is nowhere to be seen. Erdogan visited some of the disaster sites. He is acknowledging that there are problems with the government's initial response. Reuters Dominic Evans has been covering the quakes and Turkey.

Dominic, what is this going to mean for President Erdogan? Well, he's facing elections in May, and the polls before the earthquake struck were frankly too close to call. So it's a very, very tough election. The additional risk for Erdogan and his government is if they are seen to not respond adequately, quickly and efficiently enough, to the scale of this disaster, or if there are suggestions that some of the scale of the destruction was a result of poor planning or planning laws being ignored, that politically is

dangerous for Erdogan and his government. It's also possibly a case of history repeating itself because Erdogan himself came to power when he was on opposition, critical of the government response at that time to another earthquake in 99? Absolutely. There was a devastating earthquake in 1999 near Istanbul, which killed 17,000 people. This earthquake sadly may even eclipse that death toll. It's still too early to say. But there was enormous criticism of the response of authorities in 1999, as you said, and politically Erdogan was able to benefit from that. So that just reinforces what will.

become an important political element over the coming days and weeks in the response to this. In northwest Syria, meanwhile, people are relying on the White Helmets civilian defense group to rescue survivors. But even reaching devastated areas is problematic. Syria's rebel-held northwest is outside of government control. People there have already endured nearly 12 years of conflict and aerial bombardment by Syrian-Northern. forces and their Russian allies. And the conflict is hindering relief efforts. What do you think, Dominic, could this disaster prompt to any sort of cooperation between the two sides? Well, we've not seen any sign that this is going to bring any rapprochement across the front lines,

certainly between the rebels and the government side. What you may see emerging on the fringes is incremental changes. So you may see, you may see, an increase of Western aid going into government-controlled areas through NGOs, and there will also be a lot of focus on helping the Northwest. This is a moment when you would expect in a huge humanitarian crisis that people might put politics to one side, so it could be a spur to move things forward. It's very hard to see a major change, though.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa is putting the final touches on his annual state of the nation address. But in a country where constant blackouts mean a cup of tea is a daily calculation, it remains to be seen whether he can offer any light at the end of the tunnel for his people. Businesses, homes, schools and hospitals all have to cope without electricity for up to 10 hours a day after breakdowns at state-owned power company ESCOM's coal-fired plants. And they are crippling the local economy. I spoke to Tim Cox, Reuters' chief correspondent in Southern Africa,

about what he's watching for in the speech. Hi, Tim. Hi. So Cyril Ramaphosa is about to give his state of the union address, but it really seems like a state of disaster is maybe more accurate, right? Yeah, I mean, certainly the country's not in a happy place at the moment. So we've had nearly 100 consecutive days of power cuts,

and this is in an economy that's heavily dependent on agriculture and industry. So people are really struggling. The government is essentially declaring a state of disaster. Whether it works or not, it does kind of show the scale of the problem, basically. What would declaring a state of disaster mean? Well, the model they're using is with COVID. They were able to mobilize resources much more quickly. And so the idea is it removes a few of the kind of checks and balances

and the bureaucratic machine that can sometimes slow down action. The trouble is it's not clear what they can actually do with it. And it's also given that one of ESCOM's major problems is corruption. Removing checks and balances isn't necessarily going to be a good thing. How did it get to this? Yeah, the backstory is quite long and complicated. But basically, I've got all sorts of middlemen charging inflated prices for coal. Even now, you've got people charging three, four, ten times as much.

much for things like materials. And then to top it off, you now have kind of sort of criminal gangs, sabotaging power stations and transmission lines, either to steal wire or to get repair contracts. So it really is a kind of a gaudy a knot of problems that are going to be very, very hard to untangle. And what could this mean then for Ramaphosa politically, for his future? Well, he's already secured the party nomination.

He's got his sort of second term on the ticket for the ANC, and the way the electoral system works is you vote for the party, and the party with the most votes gets to the presidency. So in that respect, he's kind of more or less guaranteed to be present for a second term in elections next year. However, the ANC, the legacy party of Nelson Mandela, seems to be exhausting its huge supply of goodwill from the people of South Africa that has had since in the three decades.

It's been in power. Tim Cox. Thank you so much. That's it for this edition of Reuters World News. We'll be back again tomorrow. In the meantime, you can find more trusted news at roiters.com.