By Ajoke Babareke, Abuja
Mrs. Lillian Kalu had arrived Gwarinpa Hospital as early as she could − she was there at 8 O’clock, hoping to secure a seamless birth registration for her two year-old son. But she was not only confronted by a horde of other mothers waiting to get their wards registered, birth registration registrars were also not on ground.
“I went to Gwarinpa Hospital to collect my son’s birth certificate on Friday, September 14, 2018. When I got there, I met quite a number of other people waiting to register their kids. So we waited for the registration attendants,” she told the Swift Reporters.
After about two hours waiting, she said the attendant, a young lady arrived at about 10am− when she met the anxious mothers, they were shocked – she told them that birth registration in the hospital had stopped.
“The lady told us she was going for a training that morning, but if we wanted birth certificates for our children, we should pay N2,500 for children of two-year old kids and N1000 for new born.”
Left with no choice, the parents, Mrs. Kalu said bargained with the ‘business minded’ attendant and “she eventually collected N1000 from me, and collected between N2500 and N3000 from parents whose children were between 10 years and 13 years.
That was not all− the aggrieved mothers were further confounded when the lady told them there was no receipt for the payment.
This, according to her, was both a horrible and discouraging experience.
“Although the birth registration officer showed us a circular from her bag and said government had instructed parents to go online to register their children. For me this will definitely cause setback for birth registration in Nigeria because most of the parents are not educated or even aware of the developments,” she added.
Mathew Temidayo , Head of Vital Registration Departments at National Population Commission (NPC) headquarters, Abuja admitted that there have been allegations of fraud with regards to birth registration by some officers assigned to carry out that responsibility.
Temidayo said NPC had been in a partnership with private companies under a Public Private Partnership (PPP) arrangement to carry out the birth registration.
“There is a memorandum of understanding guiding this partnership , the firm deployed equipment for use, not just computer but hand held personal data assistance machine, it’s an hand held personal data assistance machine and it uploads information to local government headquarters. This is a whole automated arrangement,” he told Swift Reporters.
He further explained that the laws that established the NPC allows every child between the age of 0 to 50 days to obtain the birth registration certificate for free.
“Due to the backlog of unregistered children in Nigeria, the commission charges the sum of N200 but from ages 0-50 days nobody is expected to charge anybody anything − at this stage it is free.”
“The Commission now decided to enforce that side of laws establishing it and six states with FCT were been selected to do this, whoever charges N3500 is been fraudulent , the charges is not supposed to be more than N3000,”Temidayo added.
Rapid SMS performance indicator revealed total number of Birth recorded in FCT as at February 2018 for children under age 1, as 37,251, while over 39,000 of children between the ages 1 to 4 were only being recorded
The Rapid SMS dashboard also indicated that only 35 percent of children under age 1 are being recorded in February 2018 while only 12 percent of children under age 5 were recorded in February 2018.
Following this development and with the reality of Nigeria’s position currently leading nine countries with lowest levels of birth registration, it is apparent that the Nigerian government may be far away from catching up with the rest of the world.
According to Nigeria Demographic and Health Survey of 2013, 70 percent of children in Nigeria still do not have their births registered – this leaves millions of children unaccounted for from birth.
It is a matter of time to find out if the new strategy of mandating parents to pay N3000 charges to collect their babies birth certificates under a signed MOU will help Nigeria in rapidly increasing its statistics of births recorded in a period or will online birth registration without adequate awareness.
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