Can I change my surname?

By ANTHONY THIONGO

Q. Thank you for the enlightening article regarding parental responsibility published on March 14. I am a 24-year-old woman who would like help on a similar matter.

 My mother struggled to bring me up on her own as my father refused to take up his parental responsibilities. His name, however, appears on my birth certificate but when I turned 18, I omitted it while applying for my national identity card. Instead I chose my mother’s name as my surname.

But later when I applied for a passport, the immigration officials issued the passport listing my father’s name as my surname. I am now an adult and free to make my own choices.

 I do not want anything to do with my father as he abandoned me when I was an infant. Save for the birth certificate and the passport, all my other documents bear my mother’s name as my surname.

How can I expunge my father’s name from my passport and ensure that any other documents I obtain in future do not have his name? I want to eliminate any connection that there may be between my father any myself.

 

A. There is no specific legal regime dealing with passports unlike the Registration of Persons Act, which deals with the issuance of national identity cards. The High Court, in cases challenging the Government’s decision to confiscate a person’s passport, has held that being granted a passport by the Government is a privilege not a right.

I have received many queries relating to passports and feel that for readers to properly understand why a passport is a privilege and not a right, I will need to briefly delve into the history of passports.

The idea of a passport emerged once people began to travel from one country to another. In the United Kingdom, the passport began as little more than a note signed by the King or Queen asking that the bearer of the note be granted safe passage from one region to the next.

This then developed into the complex documents they are today. The concept of a passport has not changed much and hence it remains primarily a request by one sovereign state to others to allow the bearer safe passage. You cannot, therefore, force the government to request other countries to give you safe passage, as there is no law requiring the government to issue citizens with passports.

The Immigration Department has its own internal mechanisms to ensure that only Kenyans are issued with Kenyan passports.

One of these mechanisms is to link an applicant for a passport to their parents. As nationality in Kenya is primarily attached to fathers, the department always links an application for a passport to the file of the applicant’s father. For this reason, your father’s name is listed as your surname in your passport even though your identity card reads different.

It is not your right to have a passport. A court of law cannot, therefore, compel the immigration department to change the name on your passport so that your father’s name is deleted, however passionately you feel about it.

Your only option is to petition the officer in charge of issuance of passports to issue you with a fresh passport bearing the same names contained in your identity card.

In your letter, you should set out your grounds for requesting for a change of names as well as attach copies of your identity card and other documents bearing your name.

Other than your emotional objection to your father’s name being on your passport, it would be advantageous for your passport to bear the same names as your other documents to avoid future queries about the discrepancy in names. If, however, the officer  declines your request, there is not much you can do. You would have to live with your father’s name on your passport.

To avoid other documents bearing your father’s name, you should always use your national identity card as the reference point for jotting down your name.

 

Q. During the post-election crisis, I was working in South Nyanza and I saw a man beaten to death because he comes from another part of the country. His place of origin was identified from his name. Although I hail from the same region as he, I survived because I never used my family name and my complexion is not betraying either.

My girlfriend gave birth recently. We had agreed that our child would not bear any ancestral name that would link the child to a particular region of Kenya. However, at the time of delivery, my girlfriend was staying with my elder brother who is very conservative. He forced her to include our family name in the child’s birth certificate. Is it possible to change the name in the birth certificate?

 

 A. It is sad that you underwent such trauma during the post-election violence and that the trauma is still affecting you to date.

 It is unfortunate your experience is restricting you from freely choosing your child’s name and you feel compelled to remove the child’s family name from the birth certificate.

One of a parent’s rights under the Children’s Act is the right to freely choose their child’s name. I would wish that you look to the future with hope and believe that there shall never be a repeat of the type of violence experienced after the last election.

A birth certificate is a primary document and it is normally not possible to change the names in the birth certificate save to correct errors.

You may, however, register a deed poll on behalf of your child where you would declare that the child shall no longer bear your family name and shall only be referred to by the names you wish the child to bear.

 The deed poll is then gazetted in the Kenya Gazette. You may then use the deed poll when the child goes to school and later when the child applies for a national identity card to omit your family name from the child’s names.