Lead image for Why DNA testing can resolve one question and create many more.
A social media joke has it that a man who wants to establish the paternity of his children should insult the friends of his wife. He will benefit from an accurate diagnosis delivered orally and in real time at no financial cost.
Another talks of a hefty financial award for men with 10 children. A man who had nine with his wife quickly confessed to her that he had sired a child out of wedlock whom he wished to add to the nine to qualify. He ran off to fetch the child. On return, the nine children were nowhere. The wife told him that their fathers had come for them to compete for the same award!
These scenarios focus on the vexed issue of paternity, actually the doubts hanging around it. They intimate that only the biological mother knows the father of her children, although statistics show that 1–2 per cent actually do not. In other words, many men are raising children sired by collaborators. In which case, to establish the truth, they must resort to Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA) testing.
Read: Inside Kenya’s paternity testing boom
But DNA tests vary. One is the western chemical one. The other relies on “African chemistry”, conducted by villagers, especially womenfolk who visit the mother soon after delivery. This group is reportedly so astute at the exercise that it can detect resemblance between the eye lashes of the newborn and the father. Common knowledge has it that loudness about the resemblance is a good indicator of the opposite, the purpose being to psychologically flatter the “father” when the women actually know the truth.
African chemistry apart, DNA testing is becoming quite necessary in the modern world. For instance, the Daily Nation reported on August 6 that Justice Richard Nyakundi of the High Court in Eldoret urged Parliament to enact a law regulating DNA testing given that courts are increasingly relying on the same on cases of inheritance, child custody, matrimonial property and other family disputes. He noted that the technology assures evidential reliability beyond oral testimonies, but that it should also balance justice and the constitutional rights of litigants to personal privacy “because it requires close relatives to provide biological samples”.
Data from DNA Hub Africa website shows that globally, 10 per cent of men question paternity in their life time, 30 per cent of tested cases confirm asymmetry between actual and presumed paternity, majority (60 per cent) of clients seeking the tests are men compared to 30 per cent women and 10 per cent other family members and that 70 per cent of men in sub-Saharan Arica are hesitant about the tests because of social factors.
Read: Why DNA test became central in Isiolo family’s bitter land dispute