Parents want more time for birth papers

Parents want a requirement that students produce birth certificates before they are registered for this year’s national examinations postponed. Thousands of parents have been camping at civil registration offices across the country in search of the documents for their children.

Queues are long and service painfully slow, prompting fears by many that their children will be locked out of the examinations. In some parts of the country, frustrations are growing, with parents taking to the streets in protest against the slow service.

Immigration and Registration of Persons minister Otieno Kajwang’ announced last year that, with effect from this year, all students joining Standard One and registering for the Standard Eight and Form Four exams, must produce the papers. The directive was aimed at encouraging parents to register the births of their children so that the government gets data on all its citizens.

But the national examinations council will also use the information to crack down on cheats. In the same vein, non-citizens and illegal immigrants, especially in border areas, will be prevented from enrolling in local schools. Students have until March 31 to register for the Kenya Certificate of Primary Education and Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education examinations.

But with queues getting longer at service counters, most parents are worried that they will not beat the deadline. Those who spoke to KNA in Western Province said postponing the requirement would enable the Immigration ministry to speed up the issuance of birth certificates to students.

The Kakamega District Civil Registration office is handling all the cases from Vihiga, Butere, Mumias, Emuhaya, Hamisi and the larger Kakamega district. The assistant registrar, Mr Aloise Okwemba, said the office had the records of all births before the new districts were created. “This explains why many parents are coming here to process their children’s birth certificates,” said Mr Okwemba.

He said the office was overwhelmed by the large number people seeking the documents. Since the directive was issued, he said, the office had been issuing more than 500 birth papers daily. In Butere, Planning minister Wycliffe Oparanya said parents should have been given a grace period of at least three years to adhere to the new directive. 

Mr Oparanya was reacting to calls by residents to have the government cancel the exercise. The minister said that he would ask his Immigration and Education counterparts to give parents more time. In Bungoma, business was paralysed for more than two hours after residents protested against delays in the issuance of birth certificates.

Most businesses were hurriedly closed for fear of looting as protesters took to the streets. The residents, led by county council chairman Julius Bakasa, said the process was too slow and that registration officials were demanding bribes of up to Sh1,000 before issuing the documents. “People have been camping here for over a month to obtain the certificates,’’ he said outside Bungoma police station.

Efforts by police to stop the protesters from storming the registration office failed. They forced their way in and frogmarched district registrar John Mokaya to the DC’s office. The residents also demanded the extension of the deadline.

Slow and tedious

Mr Mokaya blamed the slow process on inadequate staff. “More than 2,000 people come to our office daily yet we can only serve 100,” Mr Mokaya said. He said all birth records for the seven districts in the larger Bungoma are kept at the headquarters of the old district, adding that staff had to manually confirm the records, making the process slow and tedious.

As a result, brokers had taken advantage of the situation by demanding bribes, Mr Mokaya said. Bungoma district officer Jared Otieno said that the county council had agreed to provide additional staff to speed up the process. The registration staff will also be required to put in more hours.

In Migori, Knut officials said exam candidates had suspended learning to seek the birth papers ahead of the registration for national tests. Knut branch executive secretary Charles Katege called on the government to send registration officers to schools to issue the documents to avoid disrupting learning.

He said he feared that the students may not cover the syllabus due to time wasted pursuing the papers, a situation which could ultimately affect their performance in the examinations. Parents also complained that their children were missing crucial lessons to seek birth certificates.

On Wednesday, long queues were witnessed at divisional and district headquarters in Migori, Rongo, Uriri and Nyatike districts as the registration officers appeared overwhelmed by the huge turn-out. Migori MP John Pesa called for the suspension of the exercise. “The directive has caused an acute crisis in schools,” Mr Pesa said, adding that parents needed more time to obtain the documents.

Kenya National Association of Parents Nyanza branch chairman, Mr Jackson Ogweno, said the issuance of the documents should be decentralised to chief’s camps and schools to avoid the congestion in district headquarters. “Some parents travel long distances to the DCs’ offices and fail to register their children because of the long queues,” he said.

Government order

In Taveta, hundreds of Tanzanian students learning in Kenyan schools will not sit this year’s exams because of the new directive. District education officer George Obuocha said he could not give the exact number of those likely to be affected.

He said this was a government order that everyone ought to adhere to and warned that whoever contravened it would be doing it at his or her own peril. Children from the neighbouring country flocked into Kenyan schools after the introduction of free primary education in 2003. Schools with the highest number of Tanzanian pupils include Timbila, Sowene, Madarasani, Jipe, Kitobo and Lesessia.

But Mr Amos Kibwana, an official of a non-governmental organisation, said the directive might be in futility since most parents across the border will collude with their counterparts in Kenya to acquire the documents. “Unless proper vetting is done, foreigners will end up enjoying dual citizenship,” he said.

Reports by John Shilitsa, Erick Ngobilo, Stella Cherono, Jonathan Manyindo and Elisha Otieno