Paternity Fraud: Should Offenders Go To Jail? By Funke Olaode
Otubu (not real name) was a successful banker in the late 90s. He was adored by all. Savvy, handsome and intelligent. He was considered a very spiritual one and even headed A Pentecostal church in the highbrow area of Lagos. Good job, good connections and a happy home. Things were going smoothly until the bubble burst when it was alleged that he went into an illicit affair with a church member’s wife and fathered the only two children of that union.
It was proved by DNA.
That was the end of the union, and the savvy banker quit his job and pastoral life and fled the country. He returned to the country not too long ago and tried to warm himself back to society, but his tainted image was not forgotten.
If Otubu’s case was pathetic, it was a celebrated case that lasted several weeks when a Lagos business mogul found out that he did not father one of the children of his then-trophy wife. Painful and devastating, the woman was ordered out of the house with the illegitimate child. Of course, it ended the once-upon-a-time talk of celebrity matrimony.
For those who are familiar with a popular Yoruba programme being anchored by Oriyomi Hamzat on Lagidigbo FM, ’Kokoro Alate’, it was an emotional show of shame when a couple dragged themselves to the radio station over paternity issues. It was discovered that four children of the 23-year-old marriage did not belong to the man of the house.
Another new-generation bank top gun was also enmeshed in a paternity scandal when it was alleged and accused by the husband of one of his employees that he fathered his children under his nose. The pathetic case was the sudden death of the husband of the employee, and of course, the bank eased the man out of the system to avoid further damage to its reputation.
A Thisday report, ‘DNA Testing Bombshell: 1 in 4 Nigerian Men Not Biological Fathers’, written by a Senior Writer, Ms. Mary Ekah, lent credence to this biological alteration and misrepresentation that have been going on from time immemorial. It was a shocking report by Smart DNA, a leading DNA testing centre in Lagos, revealed that a staggering 27 per cent of DNA of paternity tests conducted came back negative.
The issue of paternity fraud, incidentally, like so many other frauds looking at it from the legal angle, is a fraud because it is deceitful. However, from another perspective, it is an offshoot of matrimonial causes and issues related to marriage. The argument is, like other frauds for which the offenders are prosecuted and sent to jail, the matrimonial deception expert says it is a delicate one that will be difficult to criminalise.
Barrister Ben Abraham, the founder of Zarephath Aid (criminal justice reforms and legal aid), said, “It is a very delicate issue, and that is where one is going to be very careful because even in our criminal jurisprudence and laws, as we inherited from our colonial masters, it says that the husband and wife cannot be charged with the offence of conspiracy, for example. But then, it is one of the emerging areas, just as we have so many things in a global, in a world where so many things are going wrong, there is so much anxiety, there are needs coming up, and these needs bring up new areas that ask our jurisprudence, and therein we begin to see that there are so much lacunae that need to be filled.”
The legal practitioner added, “So, paternity fraud, as it’s called, is one of them. We have seen quite a number of big cases, and there are so many other cases, which are unreported, situations where a man stays with a woman and at the end of the day, after training the children up to university, sometimes after the marriage of the children to their spouses, the man discovers that he was not the father.”
Shifting away from what the law says, Abraham thinks it is a moral dilemma and issue. Again, when the issues are deliberated from the Christian, the Muslim, and the traditionalist angle, what does it portend?
“How does it sound from the religious angle that a woman deliberately, some of the time they have reasons, every woman has a reason for doing that. But let’s look at it from a deliberate angle,” Abraham explained. “Deliberately goes out, knowingly, saying that this man I am living with, either because the man cannot father a child, she knows, or because of other reasons, takes on another man, gets pregnant thereby, then hides it. There is a moral dilemma. There is a religious issue there. And when we begin to look at it, there is a thought dilemma.“
The issue of paternity extends beyond the couple involved. There is a third party: the child or children.
“When we talk about criminalising it, the main fraud which you have called it is, what happens to the children in these illicit affairs? The family acceptability, the family acceptability and the stigma of the society,” Abraham stressed.
According to Abraham, the consequences are enormous—for instance, the pains of coming from a union now regarded as illegitimate.
“There are cultures that accept children born out of wedlock when the man fails to pay the bride price. Automatically, such a child becomes part of her biological mother’s lineage,” the lawyer explained. “The paternity ‘fraud’ goes beyond that as the biological father is not aware that a child is hanging over his neck somewhere. The popular saying is that ‘women only know the real father of her child’. And if the truth comes out, the man can even deny it.”
But can the law take its full course in this matter?
“Most men will tell you, this should be made an offence in our criminal code, and that woman should be sent to jail because she did evil,” said Abraham. “Our jurisprudence must be very well looked at to handle it. But don’t forget that in some cases, the bond has already existed between that man and the children. We see it every day.”
The lawyer pointed out that sometimes the child is up to 12 years or 13 years.
“In some cases, it is a brilliant child. A child that is full of fun. And to break that bond now becomes another dilemma. So we now look at it from the entire gamut of situations facing the couple on the one hand, and then the larger family and then the society on the other hand,” Abraham reasoned.
He also highlighted the role of age.
“Depending on the man’s age, don’t forget. Younger men will get so angry and forget everything. A man in his 50s or 60s will look at it and still find a way to accommodate the child. The child looks at him as daddy. They bonded,” the legal practitioner noted. “That is also another dilemma in the school of jurisprudence. When we begin to talk about criminalising this, call it fraud.”
The lawyer admitted that Nigeria does not have “those laws that can effectively remand a woman in custody who cheated” but pointed out that “we have bigamy and all of that, which even as we speak today, we don’t even know whether such offences even exist.”
Abraham, however, urged married couples to embrace openness in communication.
“The basis of marriage is openness. Nakedness. For Christians, as we read in Genesis when the first couple recorded in the Bible were naked and were not ashamed. That is the first and primary law. Of course, we see that so many women today have been denounced because of this so-called fraud,” the legal practitioner explained.
He recommended that a man “who is not fertile should come out clean.”
Abraham said, “We have such instances. And then someone will say, should two wrongs make a right? No. In a situation where the man is hiding it, the woman, on the other hand, should not have gone out to also get seed from outside. A couple should, number one, be open.”
He also underscores the value of love in enshrining openness in a marriage.
“Again, the true love, which is the foundation of marriage, abhors secrecy of that nature. Or of any nature that one knows that, at the end of the day will jeopardise the entire union. These women, in particular, will have their reasons,” stated the legal practitioner. “But what reason will at the end of the day justify the fact that a woman went out, took in for another man, brought children in the house of her husband, and kept it secret?”
Some men discover the secret that there is a love child.
“Depending on the stage, they may, after some time of pleading and talking, end up accepting the child or children and now know that the rest of their lives they are going to live with this burden. That is why criminalising it may not be very, very easy; the situations will end up being different.
“I know that most men nowadays are going for paternity tests, DNA tests, the genetic tests for their children secretly. All manner of things are coming up, showing the increasing rate of distrust. The bottom line is that couples need to get it right. Those who have problems should seek help. Open communication is key as this move will prevent irreparable damage.”
