*A spot check at several establishments reveals that a DNA paternity test can cost between Ksh 25,500 to Ksh40,000 for one father and child. A home paternity test kit from KEMRI starts at Ksh 27,000. The most expensive DNA tests are prenatal DNA testing. A non-invasive prenatal paternity test (NIPT) costs Ksh200,000 while an invasive prenatal paternity test costs Ksh50,000.
*So lucrative is the DNA testing business that the Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI) has announced an increase in the price of DNA testing services for 2025.In a statement released a few weeks ago, KEMRI announced that the price would increase by Ksh7,000 to retail at Ksh27,000.
Someone once cheekily said that maternity is a matter of fact, while paternity is a matter of assumption. This in English means that that child who calls you daddy, the one you break a back to raise, could have been fathered by someone else.
And this is not cheeky to men anymore. They are taking it seriously and DNA profiling to establish paternity has become the in thing.
A few years ago, DNA test results rocked the family of a senior politician who was a cabinet minister. The Nairobi-based billionaire businessman died and influenced by greed, the politician’s children conspired to lock the lastborn out of any inheritance since they doubted if he was a legitimate child of the dead billionaire.
The man, who in his old age, had married a new wife, died when the baby he had with his new wife was a few years old. To settle their differences, the family lawyer asked the deceased politician’s children to do a DNA on the newborn. But since the old man had died, it required that all the eleven children undergo a DNA test, so that their collective DNA can be matched with the lastborn. The saga took a new twist when the doctor revealed that of all the eleven children, five weren’t fathered by the deceased billionaire. The politician, who died in an upscale hospital after a long illness was fabulously wealthy, having acquired vast tracts of land, real estate holdings, and hotels since Kenya gained independence.
Sophie Mukwana founded the very first private forensics company in Kenya in 2007. Biotech Forensics Ltd collects DNA samples for various purposes, including profiling potential suspects whose DNA may match evidence left at a crime scene, establishing paternity, and identifying crime and catastrophe victims, among other applications.
Every month, Mukwana serves about twenty-five to fifty clients, “of course, the figure is higher on an occasional good month,” she says.
Mukwana says the clients are middle-class men aged 30-40 years. And what is the reason for the rise in paternity DNA profiling?
| I want this story redone. The nose should be the two counties leading in this crisis. First, we should establish the crisis and its seriousness by speaking to the testing agencies, medical authorities and family lawyers. The question we should try to answer is: why is there such massive paternity fraud? And why is it so bad among the Meru and the Mijikenda? What are its consequences? We should have interviews with the men involved and their wives and also community and cultural leaders for perspective – Mutuma |
“Awareness. The media is awash with these cases; particularly after prominent persons die and women come up claiming the men fathered their children. Then, in all these Soap Operas, they are talking about taking a DNA test to establish fatherhood”.
As if to cement the issue, a Nairobi pollster, Dennis Otundo has revealed that almost thirty percent of men in the city could be raising children fathered by other men. According to researcher Otundo, in a survey carried out last year between January and July in Nairobi, three out of ten men are raising children fathered by other men while six out of every ten men who go for DNA tests find out that they have been caring for another man’s child. The data was collected from seven private laboratories in the city and the government chemist. 457 respondents in Nairobi were interviewed for the research which was commissioned by a local NGO.
“We found out that in all the cases at the laboratories, 37% of the men who had gone to seek paternity tests were forced by court orders, while 52% went on their own accord stemming from doubts about whether they fathered the children,” says Otundo. In a nutshell, the findings of the report stated that three out of every ten men raise children to whom they are biologically unrelated, although, in the billionaire’s case, the wives must have cheated more than usual. Nine out of ten children not belonging to those men are usually firstborns. This means that if the women cheated this occurred during the first two years of their marriages.
The research also found that six out of ten women have cheated in their marriages. The research also found that eight out of the ten births out of wedlock were a result of unfaithfulness by the partner. The partners cited a lack of adequate or not-at-all-better lifestyle as the main reason for unfaithfulness which led to these births. Other women also said that they got married already pregnant but made their husbands believe that the pregnancies were theirs. Seven out of ten women who had children out of wedlock swore never to tell their husbands the real dads of these children, let alone tell them that the kids were not theirs. All the women said they lived happily and empowering their husbands with such knowledge would lead to predictable nightmares of their lives, which they cited as divorce. Seven out of ten of the marriages where the men did not know this, lived happily.
Then there is the aspect of cost. Geneticist Dr Mukwana says DNA testing is now affordable. It costs between Sh 15,000 to Ksh.25, 000, though prices vary in different establishments. It takes about between two to ten days to get the results. A spot check at several establishments reveals that a DNA paternity test can cost between Ksh 25,500 to Ksh40,000 for one father and child. A home paternity test kit from KEMRI starts at Ksh 27,000. The most expensive DNA tests are prenatal DNA testing. A non-invasive prenatal paternity test (NIPT) costs Ksh200,000 while an invasive prenatal paternity test costs Ksh50,000.
She adds that in some cases, both men and women take the DNA test, particularly when they want to get down to a serious relationship and there are children involved.
“Some men want to be sure before they get involved,” says Mukwana. Others are in a new relationship, and having been cheated earlier, they are twice shy.
The other big reason for men seeking a DNA test on their children is what Mukwana calls ‘traditional’. Infidelity. “Some men suspect that their wives have been cheating on them and if there is a child involved, they check to make sure.”
But what is constant in these cases is that most men seeking the forensics tests are not accompanied by their wives. They do it discreetly. They are helped along by the fact that you do not need to carry the child along. A saliva sample, “something that anyone can be able to collect and carry” according to Mukwana is all that is needed. After they get the results, Mukwana says she does not know what happens. What is for sure is that Kenya is catching up with the developed world in the quest ‘to know.’