Parents and spouses have been cautioned to ensure that paternity details presented to the registrar of persons during the registration their children were in tandem with those in birth notification papers.
Kiambu registrar of persons Ms.Jane Kariuki warned that such details may not bee altered once factored in the system and urged parents to be keen during the registration exercise.
she cited cases where some jilted spouses out of vengeance falsified the paternity details only later to seek for alterations to rectify such anomalies when they are in good terms with the biological parents.
Ms kariuki advised such parents to divorce their disagreements from the documentation of their children’s records.
she was speaking to KNA during the supervision of the ongoing registration exercise that attracted hundreds of residents seeking to enlist the birth notification documents into the national data base.
“We cannot change the name of the father as captured in the notification papers and such details remain permanent and cannot be expunged from the documents of the child” she insisted.
The officer observed that some parents had a tendency of picking up some flimsy reason to deny their innocent children their biological rights to their fathers yet the child had nothing to do with the disagreement between the parents.
She said It does not matter whether the father was a dead beat or not but facts must remain as such during the registration and the name that was inserted in the notification form at birth can not be changed.
“ It is you the mother who gave us that name from the hospital where the child was born and you can therefore not disown it at the time of applying for the birth certificate” Ms kariuki stressed.
As the Registrar clarified to the long queues of applicants, it turned out that about eight women were seeking to remove the names of the fathers to their children from their documents.
She discouraged them from doing so citing a recent case in which a family successfully removed the name of the biological father only later to regret after her visa was rejected while seeking to join the father in the United States to pursue her career abroad.
The father who had acquired US citizenship had reportedly invited the ‘presumed daughter’ by virtue of their relations was shocked to learn that his estranged wife had connived with her current lover to change his daughters details
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By Lydia Shiloya
