Bureaucracy: How not to promote child adoption policy

The Child Rights Act 2003 (CRA) is the principal legislation regulating child adoption in the country, but intractable and cumbersome adoption processes have continued to keep adoptable children and would-be adopters apart. GOODNESS SUNDAY reports that many eager households are forced to abandon the process and embrace adoption syndicates, many of which bring joy and misery in equal measure.

Canada-based Mrs Adijat Mukali (not her real name), last April succumbed to the cold hands of death while undergoing In Vitro Fertilisation(IVF) procedure in Lagos.

Before opting for the IVF, Mukali had attempted to adopt a baby several times in Lagos, the city, where she grew up. In the last attempt, she exited the process after two years of making no serious headway. No thanks to the multi-layered and seemingly unending processes involved.

Mukali’s cousin, a lawyer, who narrated the incident to The Guardian said that the deceased opted for IVF as a last resort. Sadly, the Ovarian Hyperstimulation Syndrome (OHSS), which she contracted in the course of the procedure later claimed her life.

OHSSis an uncommon, but serious complication associated with controlled ovarian stimulation during Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART), and it is the most serious risk in IVF. It occurs in up to 20 percent of women undergoing IVF. If it is not well treated, severe OHSS causes blood clots, stroke, and death.

According to the legal practitioner, her cousin died because she did not want to patronise middlemen and adoption syndicates, who could have wangled their way through to get her to adopt a child of her choice, which is one of the routes now patronised by many to get their babies since the official route remains very cumbersome.

Another would-be child adopter, who also exited the process, admitted that she was advised to patronisethese syndicates to circumvent the lengthy and windy government process after following the procedure for several years, but without success.

The Lagos State-based enrollee, who simply identified herself as Mary, lamented that the intricacies associated with adoption via the official route leave many people with no option but to turn to other means.

“For people who want to go the right way, somehow the government makes things very tasking and difficult for them, and that is why many people are going the other way, and are getting the results fast,” she added.

Reliving her experience further, Mary said: “When we applied to the government in 2016, we received an SMS message from the Lagos State Adoption Office after three months of submitting our request for adoption, and that SMS remained the only correspondence from them to date.

“I did not get a first phone call from the government until two years after the application was submitted. Even after they called us, it was in March 2021 that we eventually got the letter to adopt. So, it took us over four years to get what we wanted, as people in the orphanages were also up to some mischief – tellingus, which child we could go home with, and which we could not based on instructions from above.”

Because of the compelling need to protect and safeguard adoptable children, especially in the face of proliferating stories of child trafficking, ritual killings and organ harvesters in the country, prospective adopters are made to follow very stringent, and sometimes grueling processes, which sometimes make genuine adopters get frustrated, and sometimes opt out of the procedure.

Some of these households that have undergone these grueling experiences, but are still desirous of raising children through adoption are the ones that always resort to patronising illegal adoption syndicates for a fee.

With the United Nations projections revealing that the country’s 2024 fertility rate of 5.009 births per woman, is 1.32 per cent lower than that of 2023, infertility remains a challenge in many Nigerian homes.

Also, data released by Chelsea Polis, an epidemiologist at the Centre for Biomedical Research (CBR), at the Population Council, which works in collaboration with the World Health Organisation, and the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, estimated that 31 per cent of Nigerian couples fail to conceive a child after 12 months of unprotected sex, a rate, which is as high as in the West. This is a further confirmation of the infertility situation in the country.

While adoption costs an estimated N120,000 in administrative fees only, in Lagos State, many households have exited the process after fruitlessly waiting without success.

For adoption to take place, the court (family court where the child resides) is vested with powers to grant an adoption order depending on the type of adoption that is being sought.

Section 148 of the Child Rights Act 2003, states that the Director of Child Development in the state ministry shall arrange for officers to pay periodic visits to every child adopted under the Act. They may also enter any premises where the child is adopted to ascertain whether the place is suitable for the child’s welfare and development.

However, after prospective adopters have filled their applications to appropriate quarters, especially the Ministry of Youth and Social Development, requesting approval to start the adoption process, they are interviewed by the Director of Social Welfare to determine whether they are suitable to adopt a child. This involves mandatory pre-counselling sessions, and other sessions to confirm suitability.

If approval is granted, the prospective adopters are then able to search for an adoptable child in a government-approved home. Once the applicants are certified fit, an adoption application must be submitted to the registrar of a competent court.

In the case of married couples, the application must be accompanied by a marriage certificate, birth certificate, or sworn declaration of age of applicants, their passport photographs, and a medical fitness report of each applicant, preferably issued by a government hospital.

Be that as it may, one of the pointers to the fact that the process is slow, clumsy, and time-wasting in the state, is the fact that of the 1,433 children available for adoption in 15 homes/orphanages, only about 56 children were adopted in 2023, and 24 in the first quarter of 2024, in Lagos making it a total of 80 adopted children within that period.

It is not only in Lagos State that cumbersome adoption processes are forcing would-be adopters to resort to syndicates for help. For instance, in August 2023, a family that wanted to adopt a set of twins, was swindled by a child adoption syndicate in Anambra State.

The incident occurred only a few months after a child racketeering facility, the Arrows of God Orphanage, at NkweleEzunaka, Oyi Local Council of Anambra State was exposed for what it was.

In that case, the head of the syndicate was a beer parlour operator at Nnobi, in Idemili South Local Council of the state, and she collected N3 million from the family and opened a chemist shop with the proceeds.

The twin’s saga came to light following the failure of the beer parlour operator, and a mother of three, to deliver the twins as promised. A male member of the syndicate, who is a civil servant, claimed that he got involved in the botched deal because a colleague in his office asked him to assist her in adopting a baby.

While these syndicates are fleecing many prospective adopters, the stringent procedures put in place by some state governments have left many adoptable children languishing at orphanage homes, as the government grapples to take care of them with scarce resources.

Apart from the consequences of patronising illegal operators, the rigidity of the process also has a telling effect on the inmates. The scenario is even more worrisome in states across the country where data is hard to come by.

A human rights activist and child rights lawyer, SonnieEkwowusi, said that on paper, the adoption process may seem accessible and efficient, but in practice, it can be unduly impenetrable, intractable, and cumbersome in some legal jurisdictions in Nigeria.

According to him, one of the challenges is that oftentimes prospective adoptive parents don’t know how, and where to get proper legal advice, and some who do are unwilling to seek it out. Because of this, many of them resort to patronising agents or touts, and in the process, they lose money or get into trouble.

Ekwowusi, who is the Chairman of the Human and Constitutional Rights Committee of the African Bar Association (AFBA), said that another challenge is that in some jurisdictions, such as Rivers and Lagos, which are experiencing high adoption application congestion, many applicants queuing up for years could be discouraged, and forced to give up the idea of applying for adoption.

“One of the major problems affecting adoption in Nigeria is that many prospective adoptive parents cannot find babies to adopt, except those willing to go to the ‘black market,’ where babies are trafficked or sold. Where prospective adoptive parents are so desperate to adopt, they fall into the hands of fraudsters or baby sellers, who could collect money from them under the false pretext that they are getting a child for them to adopt,” he added.

But for the Lagos State Commissioner for Ministry of Youth and Social Development, Mr. MobolajiOgunlende, the adoption process is stringent because of the need to protect the children, and to ensure that the applicants or parents are fit, eligible, and credible to adopt these children.

He said: “We have had cases where people adopt children for a couple of years and only to bring them back afterward. So, we want to avoid that because when you adopt a child, the child automatically becomes yours. The process has to be stringent so that we make the right decision in pairing the parents up with the right children.”

A Chief Magistrate in Anambra State Judiciary, Ken Nwoye, advised would-be adopters to painstakingly go through the legal process of adoption, which is through the Ministry of Social Welfare because there is so much child trafficking under the guise of adoption everywhere.

Also, former Director General of the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP), Prof Fatima Waziri-Azi, called on Nigerians to follow due process in the adoption of babies.

She pointed out that many orphanages across the country are under investigation, or are being prosecuted over child trafficking allegations.

According to Waziri-Azi, some orphanages commit a lot of infractions that can be categorised as human trafficking. The former NAPTIP boss, therefore, warned orphanages to be careful with their mode of operations, as well as cautioned Nigerians to be careful with the adoption of babies from such homes.