Inside The Birth And Death Certificates Multimillion Syndicate In Nairobi

Interior Cabinet Secretary Fred Matiang’i and his Information counterpart Joe Mucheru late Friday staged a sting operation at the civil registry headquarters at ACK Bishop House in Nairobi that led to the arrest of more than 20 suspects involved in a syndicate that took over the issuing of birth and death certificates.

The corrupt officials at the Department of Civil Registration had built the multimillion shilling syndicate colluding with private hospitals to siphon bribes from Kenyans who needed these documents.

The officials had created a backlog that meant that Kenyans would not access death or birth certificates for atleast six months unless they paid bribes by deliberately slowing down the information and communication system at headquarters.

Following a public outcry, detectives discovered that the cartel had recruited officials from several private hospitals in Nairobi who fed it with fake birth notifications. The officials then used these notifications to issue birth certificates to their clients, including foreigners.

Among those arrested in the operation were deputy registry director Paul Kagiri, principal records management officer Charles Akwoni, principal civil registration officer Charity Mwadime, her assistant Jane Wangari Maina and several clerical officers.

Mr Kagiri and Mr Akwoni are also suspected to have commissioned some of their officers to travel around the country and recruit employees and brokers from registry offices in Eldoret, Kisumu, Nakuru and Mombasa to maximise the loot.

Dr Matiang’i and Mr Mucheru, in a joint statement to the media described the rot at the registry as “a deliberate effort to subvert services to genuine citizens so as to create avenues for corruption”.

They said that by creating an artificial crisis at the registry, corrupt officers were taking home hundreds of thousands of shillings every month in bribes from poor desperate Kenyans.