13th December, 2020
Kenya is to grant citizenship to 1,600 stateless people from the Shona community who came to Kenya as missionaries.
President Uhuru Kenyatta announced the development for the stateless citizens, many of whom were born and raised in Kenya but could not be registered.
Nosizi Dube, who is among the beneficiaries of the citizenship issued on Saturday during ceremonies to mark Kenya’s 57th anniversary of independence from British colonial rule, said she is relieved her life-long struggle is over.
She said, as a stateless descendant of a Zimbabwean community in Kenya, she and her family were unable to fit into the society without a state to call her own.
“As a Shona youth, I have undergone a lot. Today I received my birth certificate,” Dube said during the ceremony.
At least 20 members of the Shona Community received their papers from the Kenyan president at the ceremony.
Kenyan Interior Cabinet Secretary, Fred Matiang’i, later issued the citizenship letters to the 1,670 Shona community residents in Nairobi. It is estimated that the community has about 3,500 descendants in Kenya, according to various refugee services organisations.
Matiang’i said the Shona Community from Zimbabwe had been living in Kenya since the 1950s.
Dube said she was one of the very first descendants of the Shona Community in Kenya, pronounced the 44th Kenyan tribe, to be registered to enter the University.
“We needed documents, including the birth certificate, to be registered for the final examination in Kenya. For many of our community members, this requirement marked the end of their education,” she said.
Dube said after months of lobbying, the authorities in Kenya agreed to take hospital records, immunization certificates and other documents to allow the stateless residents and members of the community to write the examinations.
“I was stateless. We were born at home because our parents could not access health services. They did not have the identification documents required to register for the state-provided services,” Dube said.
She sat for her final primary school examination in 2013 but could not make it to secondary school because her parents were poor and unemployed.
She said most parents of her schoolmates from the community anywhere in Kenya were unable to obtain national identification documents and were not capable of registering property and secure employment to earn any decent wages.
Most of the members of the Shona community, now officially a Kenyan tribe, were unable to access several government services, including free education.
Diana Gichengo, a Programme Manager at the Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHR), a non-governmental organisation, said the newly recognized Shona community would now be accorded a registered code, allowing them to obtain passports.
They will also receive other formal government services.
Gichengo said some Kenyan-born children inherited the statelessness from their parents.
Gichengo said there were communities whose registration code was deactivated.
“There are people who were born citizens and were stripped of citizenship. There are so many problems but statelessness is a man-made problem,” Gichengo said.
The naming of the Shona Community as a tribe comes after the naming of the Indian Community as the 43rd tribe in 2017.
The problem with the registration of certain communities who were residents of Kenya at independence in 1963 was caused by the failure by the colonial authorities to agree on a proper policy generalization and classification of registration.
The requirements for the civil registration of everyone in the country left a few indigenous people from the registration while some local citizens registered among refugees to be eligible for food aid and ended becoming stateless.
“We will begin the journey of restoring their dignity,” said Gichengo. “Many of them live in deplorable conditions and they need support. They also need to be helped to integrate into the Kenyan society,” Gichengo said.