Chioma Umeha
Lagos
Folu Adediran, 17,
a secondary school leaver who is an indigene and resident of a rural community
in Apapa town in Lagos State has just obtained a scholarship to study Medicine
in the USA.
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Folu visited the American
Embassy to process her own visa. She came with complete documents, but she had
a Church baptismal certificate to represent her birth certificate.
During the screening, her
application was rejected because she had no valid birth certificate.
Unfortunately, she missed her scholarship admission.
Folu is from a family of
three. All of them were born in a Faith-based clinic and none of them have a
birth certificate. Speaking to DAILY INDEPENDENT at Apapa Magistrate Court
where she came to swear affidavit, Folu confirmed that her birth took place in
a faith-based clinic. She said that her family lives in a hard-to-reach rural
area of Apapa and that one has to travel long distance by boat to access a
health centre.
“Therefore, many children
in my community were born in faith-based clinics or Traditional Birth
Attendants (TBA) centres,” the teenager said.
Unfortunately, their
births are not registered as bonafide members of the community. None of them
has a birth certificate.
“I only have a Baptismal and Birth Certificate
from my church.” she said regrettably, apparently ruminating over her missed
scholarship to study in the USA.
Sadly, Folu is among Nigerians
whose parents are yet to understand the significance of birth registration;
difference between Church Baptismal certificate and the certificate issued by
the National Population Commission (NPoPC), an agency responsible for the
registration of birth and death in the country.
Teenagers like Folu whose
births are not registered, have no official record of their full names,
parents, place of birth, date of birth, and nationality. Therefore, their
access to basic services is threatened.
They are at the risk of
being exploited and abused because their official ‘invisibility’ increases
their vulnerability. In legal terms, Folu and any child who share similar fate
do not exist. They along with over 1.4
million other children in Lagos with no birth registration, according to
Rapidsms.org, a global birth registration platform, will face similar
predicament without any fault of theirs.
The violation of their
rights is going unnoticed. This issue is common across the country, not only in
Lagos.
The National Population
Commission says, as at 2016, there were over 21 million people in Lagos, though
Nigeria is ranked No 1 country with children whose births are not registered.
For every 10 Nigerian children under five years, seven have no birth records.
They have no identity
because their birth was not registered and their existence is disputable. A
UNICEF report entitled: “Generation 2030,” notes that the greatest number of
births in Africa takes place in Nigeria and by the end of 2015, one-fifth of
the continent’s births took place in Nigeria alone, accounting for five per
cent of all global births. From 2015 to 2030, and estimated 136 million births
took place in Nigeria, which is 19 per cent of all African babies and six per
cent of the global total.
Commenting, UNICEF, Child
Protection Specialist, Mrs. Sharon Oladiji, Birth registration is the first
step towards recognising a child’s inalienable right as a human being, but in
Lagos state, several challenges to the registration of these children abound.
They are shortchanged of
their rights. Reacting during a two-day media workshop organised by the
National Orientation Agency (NOA) in collaboration with UNICEF, on the need to
scale-up birth registration in Lagos State, Oladiji bemoaned that the rights of
over 1.4 million children in the State was threatened and called for expansion
of birth registration services.
She noted that
prioritisation of interventions was needed to accelerate progress, especially
among the poor in rural areas and socially disadvantaged groups. Birth
registration is the continuous, permanent, compulsory and universal recording
of the occurrence and characteristics of births, as provided by regulation in
accordance with legal requirements.
In spite of numerous
developmental benefits, attention accorded it in Lagos could be better. Though
birth registration should be free, millions of Nigerians continue to pay to
register the births of their children.
This trend continues to
discourage families and consequently deny children their rights to be counted
as a bonafide citizen.
DAILY INDEPENDENT
investigations show that parents pay up to N5000 in some centres depending on
the age of the child. For instance, for children under one month, parents pay
N1, 000, while for children above a year, the cost is between N1000 and N5,
000.
Analysts view such illegal
fees to be indirectly contributing to denial of children identity, and many
will be trafficked because their birth is not recognised.
The latest data from
RapidSMS.org, a global birth registration platform shows that no fewer than
1,436,986 (31 per cent) of under-five children in Lagos are not registered at
birth.
Collaborating this
situation in Lagos, the Head of Department, Vital Registration, Department
National Population Commission, NPoPC Lagos State, Mr. Nwannukwu Ikechukwu,
attributed the low birth registration rate in the State to many challenges
including, lack of suitable offices for comptrollers and registrars; the
unhealthy rivalry between Lagos state council staff and NPoPC registrars,
touting of birth and death certificate among others. Streamlining the
challenges into internal and external institutional challenges faced by Lagos
NPoPC officials in the registration of births, Nwannukwu explained that there
are too few registrar’s covering very long kilometres.
This, he said includes
operation of two parallel and competing systems of birth registration as well
as slow digitalisation process among others.
Clarifying on external
challenges, he said that millions of especially under-5 children encountering
the formal health system to receive vaccines within five years of age are
unregistered, due to inadequate birth registrars.
Other challenges are;
“Lack of public awareness on importance of birth registration, ingrained social
and cultural beliefs that perpetuates non-registering births and deaths of
children, education actors do not appreciate or see the birth certificate as a
prerequisite for monitoring enrolment and dropout rates.
This is partly because the
Nigerian Immigration Service does not make birth certificates from NpopC
mandatory for issuing a passport to children, among others.
However, he revealed that
NPoPC is stepping up efforts to register one million children before the end of
December 2019.
With a total of 231,584 registrations
comprising 117,586 boys and 113,998
girls, Lagos had the second highest number of birth registrations in the
country in 2018 after Borno State.
The Lagos State 2019
report shows that the worst-performing Local Government Areas (LGAs) are Epe
with 28,817 registrations, Lagos Island 28,579 registrations, and Ibeju- Lekki
with 18,346 registrations.
In 2018, the
worst-performing LGAs were Ajeromi/Ifelodun with 34 per cent, Lagos Mainland
with 36 per cent and Mushin with 41 per cent birth registrations.
“When a child is not
registered, there is no official record of his/her full names and that child
will not have access to basic services,” the Head of Department, Vital
Registration, NPoPC Lagos State said.
He said to scale up the
number of registered births in Lagos, the Commission plans to create an
additional 26 centres across the state.
Nwannukwu enjoined the
government to employ more adhoc registrars, to enable the commission to cover
more areas, especially in hard to reach communities within the state.
Provisions in the current
legislation for birth registration make it mandatory for all births to be
registered. The Federal Government’s decree No. 69 of 1992 on vital
registration states that registration shall be carried out free of charge,
within a period of 60 days from the date of birth. There is obvious need to
secure the need of every Nigerian child by investing in processes of birth
registration as well as ensuring smooth coordination between birth registration
centres and health facilities.
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