Photo: The Investigative Fund When the bust-up between an emotional Nairobi Governor Mike Sonko and Pumwani Maternity Hospital authorities happened recently, one of the claims that emerged besides the complaints of badly kept dead newborns was about widespread toddler thefts, of which the hospital was accused of having a long history of.
It was alleged that mothers were often lied to that their newborns had died when that was not the case.
Similar accusations were levelled at Kenyatta National Hospital during the angry public postmortem early this year about a scandal where a doctor carried out a brain surgery on a wrong patient.
Other public hospitals have faced similar complaints of rampant child thefts over the years.
In Pumwani's case, the nurses and administrators vehemently denied the claims, yet not too long ago, in May 2013, the government briefly closed down the maternity hospital when reported instances of missing toddlers threatened to get out of hand.
The crime at issue is theft and trafficking of children, which traumatises a mother for life.
ADOPTION
In fact, the crime has been linked more to what would innocently look to be adoptions of children in the country.
It is a racket that involves adoption agencies, orphanages, private children's homes, officers in the government's own Department of Children's Services, and lawyers.
The aim is to feed demand from foreign adopters who are willing to pay large amounts of money to cut corners in adopting a Kenyan child.
A report stamped "secret" written by a "Committee of Experts" and which was presented to the government in December last year found evidence of rampant malpractices in the adoption process that involved child trafficking, abduction and child abuse.
These were being perpetrated by cartels that exploit children for commercial ends.
An earlier moratorium decreed by the government in 2014 on all adoptions until better laws and procedures were devised was, the Committee found out, being widely ignored.
NEGLECT
First, the Committee documented that adoptions are not professionalised. Just about anybody who sets up a children's home can offer them.
The children are invariably recruited from poor families, which lack the wherewithal to wage expensive court battles with well-heeled traffickers.
The cartels work like this: A vulnerable family with a baby being coveted is identified and is then accused of neglect.
Through the legal system, the child is taken away by the police and documents created to brand the child as abandoned. It is then placed in a children's home.
The mother is thereafter charged in court with neglect and remanded or given very high cash bail she can't pay.
Once she stays in remand for not less than six months, the child is declared abandoned and subsequently pronounced free for adoption.
MONEY
A child donor poses with best intentions. But usually he and his enablers are simply after money.
A child adoption lawyer can make upwards of US$10,000 (Sh1m) for the placement of a child with a foreign adopter.
The lucrative nature of this business makes these lawyers turn to adoptions as a full-time practice.
The children's home holding the child stands to make a lot of money, too.
The child adopter himself poses as a philanthropist, but in certain cases these foreigners are into criminal child sex exploitation rings which our local authorities will never uncover once the child is spirited abroad.
There is big money that exchanges hands, and that is how the Committee of Experts discovered that foreign adoption cases are processed much faster than local ones.
CULTURE
Often children's homes hold children hostage for lucrative foreign adoptions when these children have traceable families or can better do with other recommended solutions such as local foster care or guardianship.
Adoption experts say the best practice for adoptions is where a child is adopted in the country of birth.
Foreign adoptions culturally dislocate the child who will grow up in an alien environment where he/she will face complex challenges in future.
In fact the American music idol, Madonna, ran into trouble with Malawian activists as she progressively adopted four children from that country in a process deemed as circumventing local laws.
Rich and famous as she is, however, she got her way with government functionaries.
LAW
Currently, adoption in Kenya is governed by the Children's Act. However, it is loosely governed, and misconduct like falsification of documents to effect the adoptions is rife.
There is a lot that raises eyebrows. In Malindi, for instance, the Committee of Experts found that the majority of cases reviewed for guardianship and custody were emanating, oddly, from a single children's home and filed by only two law firms. That should raise the red flag.
As we embark on cleaning the country of corruption and other vices, there's a need to amend the Children Act so as to tighten the process of adoptions.
