year
Page: 8
FILE PHOTO: Tesla CEO Elon Musk attends the Tesla Shanghai Gigafactory groundbreaking ceremony in Shanghai, China January 7, 2019. REUTERS/Aly Song/File Photo
April 25, 2019
(Reuters) – A capital raise for Tesla Inc will not come cheap and Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk must finally prove to investors that he can produce and deliver Model 3s and higher margin electric cars on time, Wall Street analysts said on Thursday.
After unveiling a $700 million loss in the first quarter, Musk conceded on Wednesday evening that he needed to pull in more capital for the car world’s highest profile venture of recent years.
Seven Wall Street brokerages asked by Reuters said they expected Musk to tap investors for between $1 billion and $3 billion in the near future.
The results also stressed the company’s paying off of $920 million in existing debt in the first quarter, but bond yields in the company surged on the news, while shares fell, as investors began to price in what that might cost.
In European trading before the start of the U.S. business day, investors were already demanding a record risk premium for holding Tesla’s $1.8 billion junk bond, pushing the yield on the 5.3 percent note due in August 2025 to the highest in six months at 8.51 percent.
Tesla shares, already down more than 20 percent this year, dipped 1.4 percent to $255.13 in early trade.
After months of uncertainty following Musk’s swiftly retracted claim last summer that he was set to take the company private, and a series of failures to meet production targets, they said the cost of new capital would now be far higher than a year ago.
“Obviously, investors would have appreciated that confession (to raise capital) when the shares were higher, the fundamental performance better and Elon Musk less erratic,” Evercore analyst Arndt Ellinghorst said in a note.
Tesla’s first quarter results disappointed both in terms of sales and a sharp drop in the number of vehicles delivered to global customers, and there was scepticism over promises of a return to profitability in the third quarter.
“Ultimately we believe the company’s guidance is aggressive,” analysts from Wedbush Securities said in a note to clients.
Musk has long resisted the need to raise capital, but he told a conference call with analysts it was now the right time.
Several analysts covering the company argued Tesla needed to simplify operations.
“For investors we think the question is whether or not people want to put capital into Tesla for Robo taxis and autonomous when Uber or Lyft or Nvidia could end up being better alternatives,” Roth Capital analyst Craig Irwin wrote.
“We don’t think Tesla would need to raise capital as urgently if they weren’t spending so much money on these initiatives outside of their core mission of producing awesome EV’s”.
CFRA analyst Garrett Nelson said Tesla’s timing – with the stock down more than 22 percent year-to-date – is quite inopportune to raise capital and that Tesla should have completed an equity issuance months ago.
(Reporting by Vibhuti Sharma and Tanvi Mehta in Bengaluru; Writing by Patrick Graham, editing by Bernard Orr)
Source: OANN
FILE PHOTO: Shopping bags from Asda and Sainsbury’s are seen in Manchester, Britain April 30, 2018. REUTERS/Phil Noble/illustration
April 25, 2019
By James Davey and Paul Sandle
LONDON (Reuters) – Britain’s competition regulator on Thursday blocked Sainsbury’s proposed 7.3 billion pound ($9.4 billion) takeover of Walmart owned Asda – a huge blow to the supermarket groups who wanted to combine to overtake market leader Tesco.
The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) ruling is also a major setback for Sainsbury’s Chief Executive Mike Coupe, the architect of the deal and the group’s boss since 2014.
Coupe made unwanted headlines when he was caught on camera singing: “We’re in the money” shortly after the deal was announced last April. Analysts said questions will be raised over his future after it failed to win approval.
The deal would have resulted in a substantial lessening of competition at both a national and local level, with prices rising in stores, online and at petrol stations, the CMA said.
Coupe took issue with the CMA’s analysis.
“The specific reason for wanting to merge was to lower prices for customers,” he said in a statement.
“The CMA’s conclusion that we would increase prices post-merger ignores the dynamic and highly competitive nature of the UK grocery market. The CMA is today effectively taking 1 billion pounds out of customers’ pockets.”
Sainsbury’s, Walmart and Asda said they had mutually agreed to terminate the transaction, opting not to challenge the CMA’s ruling through the courts.
As well as leapfrogging Tesco, the deal would have given Walmart a way to exit Britain, one of the weakest performers in its global portfolio.
Shares in Sainsbury’s were down 5.1 percent at 0820 GMT, extending their losses over the last three months to 23 percent.
WORSE OFF SHOPPERS
After delivering a damning provisional report in February, the CMA’s final report was equally stern, finding that UK shoppers and motorists would be worse off if Sainsbury’s and Asda combined.
“We have concluded that there is no effective way of addressing our concerns, other than to block the merger,” said Stuart McIntosh, chair of the CMA inquiry group.
Sainsbury’s share of the UK grocery market has dropped from 15.8 percent to 15.3 percent in the last year, while Asda’s has fallen from 15.6 percent to 15.3 percent, according to data from market researcher Kantar.
All of the big four grocers have lost share to German discounters Aldi and Lidl, which now have a combined 13.6 percent share. Tesco has 27.4 percent.
Sainsbury’s and Asda have argued that their share of the total market for food was smaller than the data indicated because of the emergence of new players like delivery services, but the regulator was not persuaded.
Coupe said he was confident in Sainsbury’s strategy, which focuses on own-brand products, and on the quality, provenance and ethical credentials of its food.
Judith McKenna, CEO of Walmart International, said she was disappointed by the CMA’s ruling.
“Our focus now is continuing to position Asda as a strong UK retailer delivering for customers. Walmart will ensure Asda has the resources it needs to achieve that,” she said.
IMPLICATIONS
The implications of the deal failing are likely to be significant. Some analysts believe Sainsbury’s will have to undergo a major shake-up that could see new chairman Martin Scicluna part company with Coupe.
Analysts at Jefferies believe the risk of a reinvigorated market leader Tesco continuing to recover customers historically lost to Sainsbury’s needs addressing with urgency.
Earlier this month Sainsbury’s lost its status as Britain’s No. 2 supermarket group by market share to Asda, according to Kantar data. Tesco in contrast is gaining momentum, reporting a 34 percent jump in full-year operating profit on April 10.
With one potential exit route from Britain for Walmart blocked, analysts have said the U.S. group might instead consider a stock market listing of Asda or try to sell it to private equity.
The Sunday Times reported in February that private equity group KKR was mulling an offer for Asda.
But both of these avenues are problematic.
“The problem with the idea of private equity is that the only way PE makes money is to have its own exit and there isn’t one because you can’t break-up Asda now,” one senior UK supermarket director told Reuters.
“The problem with an IPO is – what growth prospects are you selling? The story to investors is not a very good one,” he said, adding that Walmart may decide to run Asda as a profit center and simply instruct CEO Roger Burnley to make them more money.
(Reporting by James Davey and Paul Sandle, Editing by Keith Weir)
Source: OANN
Maggie Chapman of Voices for Scotland is photographed during an interview in Edinburgh, Scotland, Britain April 18, 2019. REUTERS/Russell Cheyne
April 25, 2019
By Elisabeth O’Leary
EDINBURGH (Reuters) – As Brexit gnaws at Britain’s political structure, supporters of an independent Scotland are launching a new grassroots campaign aimed at convincing a large majority of Scots to back a split from the United Kingdom.
Scots rejected independence in referendum 2014 and support since then has stuck at around 45 percent, opinion polls say.
But they also voted to remain in the European Union in the 2016 Brexit referendum in which England and Wales voted to leave, and discontent over how Brexit is being handled is widespread.
“Voices for Scotland”, a crowd-funded initiative with about 100,000 participants, will try to boost support for secession to 60 percent via a clipboard-wielding army of activists who aim to cover the whole of Scotland.
They are targeting around one third of Scots who they believe were “soft ‘No’” voters in 2014 through their family and friends.
“It’s about conversations with people you trust,” said professor Iain Black from Stirling University, who has compiled research for the group and took part in a news conference.
Black found that women, particularly those who are young, were changing their minds about independence because of “the closing off of opportunity of Brexit,” he said. Conversely those more opposed to the idea were older citizens.
The launch comes a day after Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said the country would start preparing for a second referendum on independence before May 2021 without permission from London.
In the campaign for the 2014 independence referendum, unionists said the only way for Scotland to stay in the EU was to stick with the United Kingdom.
Sturgeon’s Scottish National Party (SNP), which runs the devolved government in Edinburgh, says a second referendum just a few years later is justified as Scotland is now being dragged out of the bloc against its will.
On Thursday David Lidington, the de facto British deputy prime minister, ruled out any referendum on Scottish independence, saying the matter was settled for a generation in 2014. Opponents of independence say Brexit has not changed Scotland’s desire to remain part of the United Kingdom.
“UK is not OK”
Debate among family and friends is the way the Voices for Scotland intends to spread its message, providing training and resources for activists. Listening to worries about independence will be as central as touting the merits of ending the 300-year-old union.
“We have to take a big majority of the country with us, and in order to do that we have to change our discourse,” actress Elaine C Smith, one of the platform’s founders, told reporters.
Secessionists want to learn from the divisiveness of Brexit and take a different tone from the 2014 “Yes” independence campaign, they say.
“We can see in the political discourse of the last year or more what a very narrow vote can do to a country and a community. That is not what we want,” Smith said.
The grassroots independence movement is still a force to be reckoned with, having boosted support to 45 percent in 2014 from around 23 percent in 2012.
Britain is mired in political chaos after parliament rejected three times the withdrawal deal negotiated by Prime Minister Theresa May and other EU leaders. It is still unclear when or even if it will leave the bloc.
“I get the sense that we are in the death throes of the United Kingdom,” Maggie Chapman, also part of Voices for Scotland and co-convenor of the Scottish Greens, told Reuters.
“One of the things that ‘no’ or undecided voters said to me in 2014, in the run-up to that referendum (on Scottish independence) was ‘why, what do you want to change, the UK is fine as it is’”.
“Brexit tells us that the UK is not OK”
(Reporting by Elisabeth O’Leary; Editing by Gareth Jones)
Source: OANN
Former Vice President Joe Biden is running into immediate headwinds from some progressive Democrats from the party’s left wing as he launches his 2020 presidential bid.
A group aligned with New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called Justice Democrats says in a lengthy statement that Biden is a centrist Democrat who could “divide the party.” It says Biden could squelch progressive enthusiasm for policies like single-payer healthcare and a Green New Deal.
The group said Thursday the “old guard” already failed to defeat President Donald Trump in 2016 and cannot be counted on to excite the base in 2020. But the statement still notes that Justice Democrats will support whoever wins the Democratic nomination next year.
Biden joined the crowded Democratic presidential contest on Thursday morning, declaring the “soul of this nation” at stake if Trump wins re-election.
Source: NewsMax Politics
Rohingya refugees carry bricks to a construction site at the Balukhali camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, April 8, 2019. REUTERS/Mohammad Ponir Hossain
April 25, 2019
DHAKA (Reuters) – Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh are at risk from landslides in the coming monsoon season and should be relocated to a remote island, the country’s foreign minister said on Thursday, a move opposed by many refugees.
Bangladesh wants to move 100,000 of the nearly 1 million Rohingya Muslims sheltered in cramped camps in its southeastern district of Cox’s Bazar to the remote island, known as Bhasan Char, which it has been developing for the past two years.
“We have information that this year there may be more rain and that may cause landslides,” Foreign Minister AK Abdul Momen told reporters after he met with officials from the United Nations and the International Organization for Migration.
“Bhasan Char island is now prepared and we can start to relocate Rohingya before the monsoon to avert any casualties in the coming monsoon,” Momen said.
The United Nations is making plans to help Bangladesh with the move, Reuters reported last month.
Some human rights groups have expressed concerns over that plan because the island is remote and prone to devastation from cyclones. Many refugees oppose the move that some human rights experts fear could spark a new crisis.
A Myanmar military-led crackdown in 2017 that U.N. investigators have said was conducted with “genocidal intent” prompted some 730,000 Rohingya to flee.
Myanmar has denied almost all allegations of atrocities made by refugees during what is says was a legitimate counterterrorism operation by its security forces.
(Reporting By Serajul Quadir; editing by Darren Schuettler)
Source: OANN
FILE PHOTO: Vice-President of the European Central Bank Luis de Guindos speaks during an event marking Latvia’s five years with the Euro in Riga, Latvia January 7, 2019. REUTERS/Ints Kalnins
April 25, 2019
NEW YORK (Reuters) – The European Central Bank is prepared to resume its quantitative easing (QE) program if needed to reach its inflation target but so far it has not discussed such a prospect, its vice-president Luis de Guindos said on Thursday.
“We closed our QE program at the end of last year but… it’s something that we can use again if needed,” de Guindos told an event in New York.
(Reporting By Trevor Hunnicutt; Writing by Francesco Canepa in Frankfurt; Editing by Gareth Jones)
Source: OANN
The Goethe Galerie shopping mall next to the headquarters of Jenoptik is pictured in Jena, Germany March 21, 2019. REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch
April 25, 2019
By Paul Carrel
JENA, Germany (Reuters) – From the 12th floor of Jenoptik’s headquarters, chief executive Stefan Traeger points to his laser factory and the university that provides it with talent. Welcome to “Optics Valley” – a role model for Germany’s East in a big year for the region.
Three elections in eastern states this autumn are focusing the minds of Chancellor Angela Merkel and her allies, who want to win over voters unhappy that their living standards still lag the West 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
They have work to do. The East was given big promises after reunification but its economy languished.
After cash injections of 2 trillion euros ($2 trillion) over three decades, the East’s economic output per capita is still three quarters of western German levels.
But the East is slowly closing the gap and several tech hubs are giving it hope of catching – and maybe eventually overtaking – the West.
In Jena, Traeger says his predecessors turned “the ruins of the old East German Carl Zeiss conglomerate” into Jenoptik – a multinational lasers and imaging equipment group.
With most of the East’s old industries long gone, Merkel’s government is trying to encourage hubs like Jena to profit from disruptive new technologies.
“I do feel at times that here in the East, still today, there is this feeling of ‘well, maybe it’s okay that we just play’. No, we want to win,” Traeger told Reuters after presenting record earnings for 2018 and a bullish outlook.
Many East German firms closed after reunification, so why was Jenoptik different? Traeger says its first CEO, Lothar Spaeth, a former premier of Baden-Wuerttemberg in Germany’s West, saw potential to create a world-class business out of an “unpolished gemstone”.
With the aid of government loans, Spaeth built Jenoptik from the Carl Zeiss group, but at a price.
“It was a very difficult time. Several thousand people lost their jobs,” said Helmut Bernitzki, 62, who joined the forerunner to Jenoptik in 1984.
“We had to expand into new markets,” Bernitzki, now an expert in optical coatings at Jenoptik, said. “We fought to be profitable and to create jobs here again.”
In a city of 110,000 inhabitants, 22,000 of them students, Jenoptik has channeled ideas from the university into specialized laser and optics products to give the company a technological edge.
(For a graphic: https://tmsnrt.rs/2GGQUVz)
PRODUCTIVITY PREMIUM
The upshot is high productivity: Jena’s output per worker is the highest in the eastern state of Thuringia, and slightly higher than towns like Bielefeld and Bochum in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia, Federal Statistics Office data show.
“Here in the ‘Optics Valley’ in Jena, we have a very closely connected community and it does feel like Silicon Valley, on a smaller scale,” said Traeger.
He aims to turn ideas stimulated by Jena’s university into high-tech products that “create and justify price premiums”.
Generating this added value has eluded other industries in Germany’s East. Solar power firms made a promising start in the early 2000s before Asian rivals undercut many of them, with the loss of thousands of jobs.
Developing products that rivals cannot beat on price is the holy grail for the optics, biotech and artificial intelligence start-ups taking root in the East – many around universities and research institutes.
But for the East as a whole, productivity was three quarters the western average in 2017, the latest government figures show.
“The availability of skilled labor is much lower in east Germany,” said Reint Gropp, head of the Halle Institute for Economic Research (IWH).
His policy prescription: make the East more attractive to qualified migrants, and invest in universities, research facilities and urban centers. In short, be more like Jena, home to the Fraunhofer optics research institute and the Friedrich Schiller University, where 14 percent of students are foreign.
The East’s appeal to foreigners took a hit last year, however, when Chemnitz, a town east of Jena, saw Germany’s most violent right-wing protests in decades after the killing of a German man, for which two immigrants were arrested and one later released.
INNOVATION CLUSTERS
The federal government is now encouraging high-tech hubs in Berlin, Potsdam, Leipzig, Dresden and Jena.
The initiatives are bearing fruit. For the first time since reunification, more people moved from the West to the East – excluding booming Berlin – in 2017 than the other way around, government figures show. Small and mid-sized enterprises are driving the revival.
Success stories include Halle-based ProBioDrug, which is developing products to treat Alzheimer’s disease, and Jena medical devices maker Avatera Medical, which people close to the matter say is considering a stock market flotation.
Not all areas are thriving. In the Lausitz region south of Berlin, plans to phase out coal mining are worrying locals.
Unemployment in the East – at 6.7 percent – is still 2 points higher than in the West, and the population is older.
Easterners also feel their prospects are poorer. A recent study by the DeZIM institute for research on integration found a third of ‘Ossies’ believe they are treated as second-class citizens, about the same proportion as Muslims.
FAR-RIGHT CURSE
In Jena, mayor Thomas Nitzsche wants to export his city’s success to surrounding areas, where the far-right and left play on people’s fears of being left behind.
Between 1990 and 2016, the East’s population fell by 11.2 percent to 16.2 million, government figures show. The number of working-age people is expected to decline up to 2030, with those over 65 rising to a third from a quarter.
Nitzsche is trying to meet Jena’s demand for talent.
“Even if we retained all the school leavers and university graduates we have here, that would still be too few,” said Nitzsche, a liberal Free Democrat.
“So we need to attract people here – not just from Thuringia, but across the country and abroad.”
Ahead of the regional elections on Sept. 1 in Brandenburg and Saxony and on Oct. 27 in Thuringia, the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) is polling close to 20 percent in all three states – putting it in second or third place.
None of the major parties want to share power with the AfD. Mainstream politicians, business leaders and think-tanks agree: the East can continue on an upward trajectory if remains open to skilled outsiders to help its young firms grow.
The East, said Gropp at the IWH institute, has less to lose by taking a chance on new technologies than the West, where the auto sector and other mature industries face challenges from innovations like electric cars.
“East Germany has a better chance of handling this more disruptive structural change, which can take place much more easily in new firms,” Gropp said. Could the East even overtake the West? “I think it could, absolutely.”
(Additional reporting by Michael Nienaber and Markus Wacket; Editing by Giles Elgood)
Source: OANN
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi reacts during a roadshow in Varanasi, India, April 25, 2019. REUTERS/Adnan Abidi
April 25, 2019
By Rajendra Jadhav
NASHIK, India (Reuters) – Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling party and a Hindu nationalist ally face a big electoral challenge in the critical western state of Maharashtra where rural distress, unemployment and drought may hurt Modi’s bid for a second term.
Strategists already expect Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to lose ground in the most populous state of Uttar Pradesh in the north, as voting is underway in a general election that began on April 11 and ends on May 19.
That coupled with possible losses in Maharashtra, home to India’s financial capital, Mumbai, and the second most seats in parliament after Uttar Pradesh, would make it harder for the BJP-led coalition to win a governing majority, they say.
The BJP and its regional ally, Shiv Sena, won 41 of 48 seats in Maharashtra in the 2014 election. There are 545 seats in the lower house of parliament.
How rural India votes will largely determine the outcome. Nearly two-thirds of its 1.3 billion people live in the towns and villages in the countryside.
Only a few weeks ago, Modi appeared to have turned back the opposition tide in Maharashtra with his tough line on Pakistan after Islamist militants based there killed 40 Indian police in a suicide attack in the disputed Kashmir region.
Modi ordered an air strike on a suspected militant camp in Pakistan, and doubled down on security as a campaign issue.
“In March, it looked like the BJP-Shiv Sena alliance in Maharashtra had an edge due to the air strikes,” said Pratap Asbe, a political commentator based in Mumbai.
“But in the past few weeks the opposition has seized on issues such as unemployment and lower crop prices that have hurt voters,” he said.
FARM SUICIDES
Reuters interviewed 148 farmers from 11 districts in the state in March and April, and nearly two-thirds said their incomes had fallen and they blamed the government for not doing enough to support crop prices.
The BJP-led state government’s slow response to the farm crisis has inflamed the anti-incumbency mood ahead of a state election due by October, Abse said.
Protests by farmers in the state have grown in the last two years as crop prices plunged, while some gave up hope.
There were 3,661 farm suicides in Maharashtra in 2016, nearly a third of the national toll that year, according to government data. Recent numbers are not available.
The farm crisis is acutely felt in the sugar industry.
Sugar mills in the state, India’s second-biggest producer of sugar, cotton and soybeans, have run up a record $614.8 million in arrears to cane farmers due to poor sales amid a sugar glut.
“Sugar mills are not paying government-mandated prices for cane and have also been delaying payments for months,” said Madhav Pawase, a farmer in Nashik district, nearly 175 km (110 miles) north of Mumbai.
Modi’s administration has done little to ensure mills pay the right price to farmers on time, added Pawase, who voted for Shiv Sena in the 2014 election.
Poor rains have added to farmers’ woes. Rainfall in the state was 23 percent below normal in 2018, wilting crops and causing water shortages.
Farmers say the government is reluctant to open cattle shelters where livestock can get free water and fodder.
The lack of jobs is also major issue for voters in Maharashtra, where competition for government positions has fueled community tensions.
The state’s dominant Maratha community has organized protests and shutdowns, including marches to Mumbai in recent years, to demand that government posts are reserved for them.
“There are no jobs today. We want a government that will create jobs,” said Akash Phalke, a mechanical engineer who has spent the past two years looking for a job.
INFIGHTING
Shiv Sena is one of the BJP’s oldest allies, but they have long squabbled over how to share power. Shiv Sena had said it would contest this general election alone, but agreed just before the polls to another tie up with the BJP.
However, it’s not clear if BJP and Shiv Sena cadres have embraced the renewed alliance on the campaign trail, said Sunil Chawake, a senior assistant editor at the Maharashtra Times newspaper.
“The lower level workers of both parties have grudges against each other and don’t work together cohesively,” he said.
The partnership between the opposition Congress party and its Maharashtra ally, the Nationalist Congress Party, is more watertight, Chawake said.
The opposition also got a boost when a regional party, the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, decided to sit out the general election and its leader Raj Thackeray began campaigning against the BJP.
“Thackeray has been propelling the winning chances of the opposition in Mumbai and the adjourning areas,” said Asbe.
(Reporting by Rajendra Jadhav; Editing by Martin Howell and Darren Schuettler)
Source: OANN
FILE PHOTO: Job seekers speak with potential employers at a City of Boston Neighborhood Career Fair on May Day in Boston, Massachusetts, U.S., May 1, 2017. REUTERS/Brian Snyder
April 25, 2019
WASHINGTON, (Reuters) – The number of Americans filing applications for unemployment benefits increased by the most in 19 months last week, but the underlying trend continued to point to labor market strength.
Initial claims for state unemployment benefits jumped 37,000 to a seasonally adjusted 230,000 for the week ended April 20, the Labor Department said on Thursday. The increase was the largest since early September 2017. Claims dropped to 193,000 in the week prior, which was the lowest level since September 1969.
Economists polled by Reuters had forecast claims rising to only 200,000 in the latest week. The Labor Department said no states were estimated last week. Claims tend to be volatile around this time of the year because of the different timings of Easter and Passover holidays, as well as spring breaks.
Despite the volatility, labor market strength remains intact. The four-week moving average of initial claims, considered a better measure of labor market trends as it irons out week-to-week volatility, rose 4,500 to 206,000 last week.
Job gains averaged 180,000 in the first quarter, well above the roughly 100,000 jobs per month needed to keep up with growth in the working-age population. The strong labor market is helping to support the economy which is slowing as last year’s fiscal stimulus fades.
The unemployment rate is at 3.8 percent, close to the 3.7 percent Federal Reserve officials project it will be by the end of the year.
Thursday’s claims report showed the number of people receiving benefits after an initial week of aid rose 1,000 to 1.66 million for the week ended April 13. The four-week moving average of the so-called continuing claims fell 25,000 to 1.69 million. The continuing claims data covered the week during which households were surveyed for April’s unemployment rate.
Continuing claims declined by 100,000 between the March and April survey periods, suggesting an improvement in the unemployment rate this month.
(Reporting By Lucia Mutikani; Editing by Andrea Ricci)
Source: OANN
Mariam Nabatanzi’s son carries a meal at their family home in Kasawo village, Mukono district, east of Kampala, Uganda March 7, 2019. REUTERS/James Akena
April 25, 2019
By Elias Biryabarema
KASAWO, Uganda (Reuters) – Mariam Nabatanzi gave birth to twins a year after she was married off at the age of 12. Five more sets of twins followed – along with four sets of triplets and five sets of quadruplets.
Three years ago, however, the 39-year-old Ugandan was abandoned by her husband, leaving her to support their surviving 38 children alone.
It was just the latest setback in a life marred by tragedy for Nabatanzi, who lives with her children in four cramped houses made of cement blocks and topped with corrugated iron in a village surrounded by coffee fields 50 km (31 miles) north of Kampala.
After her first sets of twins were born, Nabatanzi went to a doctor who told her she had unusually large ovaries. He advised her that birth control like pills might cause health problems.
So the children kept coming.
Family sizes are at their largest in Africa. In Uganda, the fertility rate averages out at 5.6 children per woman, one of the continent’s highest, and more than double the global average of 2.4 children, according to the World Bank.
But even in Uganda, the size of Nabatanzi’s family makes her an extreme outlier.
Her last pregnancy, two and a half years ago, had complications. It was her sixth set of twins and one of them died in childbirth, her sixth child to die.
Then her husband – often absent for long stretches – abandoned her. His name is now a family curse. Nabatanzi refers to him using an expletive.
“I have grown up in tears, my man has passed me through a lot of suffering,” she said during an interview at her home, hands clasped as her eyes welled up. “All my time has been spent looking after my children and working to earn some money.”
Desperate for cash, Nabatanzi turns a hand to everything: hairdressing, event decorating, collecting and selling scrap metal, brewing local gin and selling herbal medicine. The money is swallowed up by food, medical care, clothing and school fees.
On a grimy wall in one room of her home hang proud portraits of some of her children graduating from school, gold tinsel around their necks.
“Mum is overwhelmed, the work is crushing her, we help where we can, like in cooking and washing, but she still carries the whole burden for the family. I feel for her,” said her eldest child Ivan Kibuka, 23, who had to drop out of secondary school when the money ran out.
TRAGIC STORY
Nabatanzi’s desire for a large family has its roots in tragedy.
Three days after she was born, Nabatanzi’s mother abandoned the family: her father, the newborn girl and her five siblings.
“She just left us,” said Nabatanzi sombrely, as some of her ragged children played on the dirt floor while others did chores.
After her father remarried, her stepmother poisoned the five older children with crushed glass mixed in their food. They all died. Nabatanzi escaped because she was visiting a relative, she says.
“I was seven years old then, too young to even understand what death actually meant. I was told by relatives what had happened,” she said.
She grew up wanting to have six children to rebuild her shattered family.
Providing a home for 38 children is a constant challenge.
Twelve of the children sleep on metal bunk beds with thin mattresses in one small room with grime-caked walls. In the other rooms, lucky children pile onto shared mattresses while the others sleep on the dirt floor.
Older children help look after the young ones and everyone helps with chores like cooking. A single day can require 25 kilograms of maize flour, Nabatanzi says. Fish or meat are rare treats.
A roster on a small wooden board nailed to a wall spells out washing or cooking duties.
“On Saturday we all work together,” it reads.
Having endured such a hard childhood herself, Nabatanzi’s greatest wish now is for her children to be happy.
“I started taking on adult responsibilities at an early stage,” she said. “I have not had joy, I think, since I was born.”
(Reporting by Elias Biryabarema; Editing by Maggie Fick/Katharine Houreld/Susan Fenton)
Source: OANN
MAGA One Radio