The last time I resolved to examine the tissues in the issues of paternity fraud and the chaos it has brought on African families, especially those domiciled in Western countries, I received a lot of disturbing revelations–from men who felt used, fooled and destroyed.
A Ghanaian professor in the United States wrote a long, emotional account of how the American immigration system exposed a fat lie he had lived on for twenty-two years.
Two of his three kids had been flashed as not matching his DNA properties during paternity tests, which is sometimes required for family sponsorships and Green Card applications. “My world crashed”, he sobbed.
Every father’s Golgotha
The American Government destroyed your marriage, I quipped. The professor’s repartee was surprisingly swift but predictably impatient: “No, my wife destroyed our marriage; not the American Government. They only uncovered the fraud she perpetrated on me and my family for 22 years. At my age, am I now going to start another family to have children?
With another woman?” Perhaps in haste and pure disgust, he made the unpopular decision of ‘unfathering’ the only child that passed the paternity test.
A lone healthy fruit in a pack of rotten apples must be luck.
The American government may have exposed the fraud–which fraud would have remained forever buried in the belly of the beautiful family life he enjoyed with his wife and kids before immigrating to California. What if there was no paternity test?
He would be happily reunited with his family.
Similarly, if the kids had been born in California, the American immigration system would not be worried if the kids were not his.
They would just be another statistic in the California health data.
These formed the central thesis of the article in which I argued that the family sponsorship programmes of Western countries should scrap paternity tests as a requirement for immigration.
I argued that these rich countries were destroying our marriages and tearing our families apart with a mere laboratory test.
I was, however, also honest to have exposed our own complicity in the matter–because without those tests, African men who have no sperm at all or have broken penises would sponsor hundreds of children abroad for huge payments.
Women and Womb(men)
We cannot tell the Americans and Canadians how to tighten their immigration sponsorships in relation to paternity, but we can tell the Parliament of Ghana not to muddy the paternity waters by passing a bill to make paternity tests compulsory for all newborns in Ghana.
Presently, Parliament is considering a Private Member’s Bill introduced by Gomoa Central legislator, Kwame Asare Obeng, to subject all newborns in Ghana to DNA paternity testing, to reduce paternity fraud.
If passed, all hospitals would be required to demand the physical/blood samples of fathers, would-be fathers or supposed fathers of babies in baby cots or incubators, to prove, or in cases of contestation, disprove their relationship with the innocent babies.
These days, thanks to innovations in science and technology, paternity can be established while the baby is still in the womb. Runaway fathers would be made accountable to their children while trust between partners would be enhanced.
It will also reduce doubts among lovers and promote family harmony.
When passed, Ghana will be the only country in the world to make DNA paternity testing compulsory at birth.
In France, DNA paternity tests are only possible via a court order. When we hear the results of paternity tests openly discussed on social media in Ghana, particularly on family FM/TV programmes by popular hosts Auntie Naa and Ohenini Adazoa, we unwittingly celebrate the vindication that results from such tests, especially when somebody (usually a man) is wrongly accused.
We however, do not calculate the social damage that eventually greets the woman and the child.
In the absence of social and welfare interventions for the most vulnerable sections of our population, we only render these victims more vulnerable.
God’s business
Every mother knows the father of their child, Asare Obeng, forcefully establishes.
If a mother knowingly pins a baby/pregnancy on a man other than the biological father, the bill is recommending a prison term for the woman.
Well, if a rapist whose cruel act results in pregnancy would not suddenly be absolved of punishment if he claims paternity, why should a mother walk free when she cruelly donates her baby to a man she knows shares no blood relationship with her child?
She is as wicked as the rapist, except that she offered to accommodate the proceeds of crime in her womb.
What do our laws say about accomplices who dishonestly receive and keep stolen cars? They are thieves who get punished.
Perhaps, the Parliamentarian’s call is supported by Article 7 of the United Nations Child Rights Convention: every child has the right to know their parents.
This also happens to be the position of the Ghanaian professor in California who, on account of the paternity problems in his immigration sponsorship, has suddenly revised his will.
Paternity goes beyond DNA and bloodline; it is economic: how does a man work so hard to deliver his estate to a fraudster on account of false paternity?
Meanwhile, the UN Convention did not say a child has the right to know their biological parents; it only said parents.
In Ghana, we do not only work with laws (common, customary or constitutional); we also work with the societal conspiracy that the handsome boy next door may not be the biological child of ugly Mr Mensah, because we know what Mrs Mensah does in the closet with Mr. Aboagye.
We shut our mouths because nobody is breaking the law. It’s God’s business; not ours.
By KWESI TAWIAH-BENJAMIN, Canada
Tissues Of The Issues
bigfrontiers@gmail.com
Ottawa, Canada
