MQONDISI MOYO is not the first man to be a victim of paternity fraud and he won’t be the last.
Newspapers are always publishing stories of men who wake up to find that the child they were maintaining was not theirs.
Tinashe Mugabe, the principal consultant at Global DNA Zimbabwe, has made a killing via a YouTube program that settles paternity.
While paternity fraud is not new, its exposure is a novel experience for many.
Since the days of yore, many children are born to men who think they are the father but are not.
These men have endured financial responsibility for children that are not theirs.
Women make false claims about who is the father in hope of collecting child support payments.
Sometimes when they suspect that their man is not the father, they do not tell him in order to keep the family together.
This is unjust.
To prevent women from committing paternity fraud, DNA testing when a child is born should be mandatory.
Paternity testing should be required before a man can be listed on a birth certificate as the father.
Such requirements would prevent the mother from lying, not only to the man, but also to her child.
Women should not see this as an attack on them as it will also benefit them.
A mandatory DNA test also protects mothers from men who refuse to acknowledge that they are fathers.
Many women are raising children alone after the fathers denied responsibility.
A DNA test, ordered by the law, will put an end to this.
Revealing the truth of paternity abolishes ambiguity and delivers equality and justice.
Thus, to stop misattributed paternity, the Government should introduce mandatory paternity tests prior to the registration of paternity on birth certificates.
Since abortion is illegal in Zimbabwe, DNA testing must be mandatory to force men into fatherhood.
The responsibility of raising a child must not rest on the mother alone just because the father does not feel like it.
Men in Zimbabwe can freely avoid taking responsibility for unwanted pregnancies that they caused.
Forcing them to share the burden of child rearing outside wedlock can only be achieved if DNA testing is made mandatory.
Before DNA testing technology came to Zimbabwe, there was essentially no way to conclusively determine fatherhood.
Now that we have the technology, DNA testing must be made common for all our sake.
