Defend Family Values, “don’t yield to pressure”: Kenya Christian Professionals Forum Official to Africa’s Leaders

“Unfortunately, some foreign countries and international institutions have embraced this ideology, and they are pushing these values down the throats of African countries,” he lamented in the May 12 interview at the start of the five-day conference on the family that members of the Africa Christian Professionals Forum (ACPF) organized.

Mr. Kanjama, an advocate of the High Court of Kenya, recalled how Uganda was denied funding following the East African nation’s resolve to enact an “anti-homosexuality law to deal with the blatant homosexual lobby that was trying to push LGBT ideology in their country.”

Credit: ACPF

“They were denied funding,” Mr. Kanjama recalled. He denounced “this is a kind of pressure that is brought to bear on African countries, African institutions, and African people when they try to preserve their moral values” noting that “many of these moral values are family values.”

He called upon Africa’s leaders “to stand firm and to blow the whistle when these attempts are made.”

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The Kenyan Senior Counsel said that resisting unorthodox and harmful foreign ideologies would help inform “Africans who support their governments in preserving strong families” and empower them to take action where possible.

Africa, he acknowledged with appreciation, has “a genius in appreciation of family as both a personal union and a union that has a communal or community dimension.”

Credit: ACPF

“That's our specific African insight into family, but whether you are in Africa or in the rest of the world, we also have shared heritage from religion,” the Kenyan legal expert said, alluding to the value of faith among Africans.

“It is not only African in the sense of African culture; there's also the aspect from religion,” Mr. Kanjama said, noting that Christians in Africa have a common understanding of the meaning of the family institution.

“Religion has taught us that family begins with marriage, which is a covenant between a man and a woman for the sake of companionship and to have children, to bring up children,” Mr. Kanjama told ACI Africa at the start of the May 12-17 PACFV conference, organized under the theme, “Promoting and Protecting Family Values in Challenging Times.”

He weighed in on the reported rise in cases of broken families, attributing the phenomenon to “laws and cultural practices that are harmful to the family”, which he said result in “high cases of divorce, separation, high cases of domestic violence, even problems of sexuality like homosexuality, and adultery.”

Credit: ACPF

Mr. Kanjama, a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators Kenya (F.CIArb), also lamented what he described as a growing trend of absentee fathers.

He said, “We're also finding that our modern culture has tolerated a high level of what we call fatherlessness or father absence in the home because the parents are in different places or the father is working very hard for economic purposes and is not present for the children.”

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The five-day event is to feature a three-day ACPF Family Conference from May 12 to 14, a joint celebration of the International Day of Families (IDOF) with the Government of Kenya on May 15 at Strathmore University, and a Family Symposium with the Church on May 16.

Nicholas Waigwa is a Kenyan multimedia journalist and broadcast technician with a professional background in creating engaging news stories and broadcasting content across multiple media platforms. He is passionate about the media apostolate and Catholic Church communication.