Chaos in Uganda as more men seek DNA tests and the results are ripping families apart

As we speak, the Ugandan Directorate of Citizenship and Immigration Control (DCIC) has already received letters from at least 32 men demanding the cancellation of their children’s passports after DNA results proved they are not biological fathers.

The men have since demanded their details extracted from the children’s passports.

The entire cataclysm was sparked by a Europe-based Ugandan who, after a fight with his wife, who accidentally blurted out that he was not their children's real father, took DNA samples for testing and was, to his utter surprise, shocked to learn that he really was not the father of any of the six children.

The man, who had been educating all of the six minors in expensive schools abroad, hogged the headlines after he conducted secret DNA tests of all of the kids at the Directorate of Government Analytical Laboratory (DGAL).

Not content with the initial results, the man is said to have taken some samples to Canada and others to South Africa and they all confirmed the same thing - none of the six children were his.

This inspired an unprecedented spike in DNA tests in Uganda with the number of men seeking DNA paternity tests for their children increasing by 70 per cent.

Uganda’s Ministry of Internal Affairs on Monday said the average number of men that sought paternity test three years ago was three per month but it has significantly risen to a hundred for the same duration.

“Last week alone, we had around 40 people, who were looking for services of DNA at the ministry because they know that we do control the Government Analytic Laboratory,” the ministry spokesperson Simon Mundenyi Mundenyi was quoted as saying.

The frenzy, which is threatening to destabilise homes and wreck marriages across the Matoke nation forcing Mr Simon Mundeyi, the Internal Affairs ministry spokesperson to speak out to allay the situation and broker some sort of consonance.

While speaking to the press, Mr Mundeyi is now asking Ugandan men to ditch the DNA hysteria and simply raise the children in their homes as though they were their own.

"Someone else is raising your children too," he pleaded.

His suggestion, though noble, is still not the elixir he assumes is going to fix mistrust, infidelity and sexual violence in millions of homes across Africa.

As the craze catches pace, innocent children are getting caught up in the crossfire - as their parents battle it out with the authorities, too late in the parenting journey.

The crisis, too, has a lasting effect on men who discover, too late in life, that the children they had come to love, support, educate and accept as their own indeed belong to another man.

Speaking on NTV Uganda, Grace Nakirijja Lwanga, a Ugandan feminist said that DNA tests are no longer a woman's issue but a family matter.

"I have been following conversations of people condemning women when DNA results don't match a man's but how do such families start up? Do people have meaningful conversations? DNA, whether the results are positive or not is no longer a woman's issue, it's a family matter," she said.

"You could find the people complaining are absentee men, all they do is pay fees but abandon other important duties."

While the Uganda scenario is not specifically special, it has undoubtedly reignited the oft-hushed DNA debate in African households.

In the West, DNA tests are a more popular exercise with the results more or less mirroring those of African nations. 

In 2017 for instance, a testing firm called DNA Clinics analysed 5,000 results selected randomly from between January 2014 and June 2016 and found that almost half of UK men who took a paternity test turned out not to be the real father.

Right now, Ugandan men are in the crazed race of their lives - and the results will undoubtedly shake up the very foundation of matrimony and child support across the land.