Raised eyebrows over proposed child legislation

Proposed legislation on the protection of the Kenyan child has been cautiously welcomed by the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), although the draft Children’s Bill has been eyed warily in some quarters. UNICEF’s communications officer, Greg Owino, said the organisation was consulting with constitutional experts to see how best child rights could form an integral part of Kenyan law. “Since children’s rights are human rights, their views should be considered in the legislators’ deliberations,” UNICEF stated at a forum in the Kenyan capital last week. Celebrations marking the 11th anniversary of the International Convention on the Rights of the Child at the Kenyatta International Conference Centre were explosive and exhaustive but received little media coverage. Invited parliamentarians stayed away from the event - convened under the aegis of UNICEF - that drew participants as young as 10. Street children, a living testimony of the plight of the Kenyan child, were conspicuously absent from the forum. Participants demanded that the police revise their approach to child-related incidents and crime before “unleashing terror on innocent beings”. Children, for their part, challenged the authorities on the draft law awaiting debate, which they claimed was biased and discriminatory in tone. Kenyan children’s input into the draft has been ignored, yet their South African peers participated in that country’s draft bill right from the grassroots, observers noted. Twelve year-old Zaheera Hasanali and his colleagues told the Nairobi forum that children born out of wedlock were entitled to parental love and protection, an issue largely ignored in the 48-page draft. The comments were reminiscent of the repealed ‘Affiliation Act’ that made the youth aware of the consequences of premarital sex. Men involved in casual relationships abrogated their parental obligations soon after the repeal of the ‘Affiliation Act’, which had made it mandatory for them to contribute to the upbringing of their offspring. Parliament repealed the law 31 years ago after allegations that it was abused by women, some of whom sought to affiliate their children to a number of “fathers”, notably the affluent and leaders. The repeal of the Act freed men of their parental responsibilities, which encouraged many of them to leave women holding the baby — literally. This has led to many backstreet abortions and a sharp increase in the number of street children, single mothers and prostitutes. Street children come from diverse backgrounds but are predominantly the products of broken homes, casual sex, prostitution, economic hardships and underemployment. Many of them double up as breadwinners for their families by begging, washing cars, acting as car park attendants or selling recyclable materials scavenged from garbage mounds. At worst, they threaten and rob people, with tourists being their favourite targets, to earn their daily bread. “No matter how good street children might be, the authorities see them as a nuisance,” said 20-year-old Mwangi, who has been on the streets for five years. He lives with his mother but does not even know his father. Onyango, a 10-year-old AIDS orphan, is compelled to beg after relatives abandoned him. He is one of the many children who are not aware of the draft law to protect the child. Holding a plastic glue bottle in his hand, he says simply: “Those who already enjoy parental love and care will benefit from such a law.” There are many similarly sad tales from minors whose homes are the streets and glue-sniffing a pastime. Observers say the draft Children’s Bill falls short of expectations and may not see the light of day in Kenya’s male-dominated legislature, which would be loathe to see a return of anything akin to the ‘Affiliation Act’. An editorial in Kenya’s ‘Daily Nation’ said the architects of the bill had “sidestepped the controversy over the role of fathers in the upbringing of children born out of wedlock”. “Children have paid a horrific price for the repeal of the Affiliation Act,” the editorial went on. “The message we sent out in that instance was that fathers need not be too concerned about taking care of their own offspring...The evidence of it is all over the slums and streets of urban centres throughout Kenya.”