A new report by Smart DNA Nigeria has revealed that 23.6 per cent of recorded paternity tests for 2025/2026 outcomes turned out negative, meaning the tested men were not the biological fathers.
Boys accounted for 56.1 per cent of negative firstborn outcomes.
At roughly one in four, the figure is striking, but slightly lower than the 24 per cent recorded in the preceding period, reports The Nation.
The pattern over three reporting periods shows a gradual decline, from 26.1 per cent in 2023 to 24 per cent in 2024/2025 and 23.6 per cent in 2025/2026.
The numbers remain significant. But the story is not merely about DNA; it is about trust, doubt and the human need for certainty.
Smart DNA’s Operations Manager, Elizabeth Digia, captured that dimension when she said: “Most of the men and women who come to us are not coming because anyone told them to. They come because they cannot live with the question. That is a deeply human experience, and it deserves to be treated with dignity — not sensationalism.”
The laboratory’s data suggest that paternity testing has become an increasingly important instrument for resolving questions that many families are unable — or unwilling — to settle through conversations.
The numbers also reveal who is asking the questions. Men accounted for 78.6 per cent of recorded first contacts, compared with 15.2 per cent for women.
Men aged 41 and above constituted the largest age group, accounting for 48 per cent of age-classified male records, while 59.5 per cent of tested individuals were aged five or younger.
That raises uncomfortable questions about the nature of suspicion within Nigerian families. Why are men increasingly seeking scientific proof of biological fatherhood? How long do some of them live with doubts before finally taking the test?
‘’And what happens to a marriage when a laboratory report confirms what one partner feared — or exposes what the other hoped would remain hidden?
‘’For men who receive a negative result, the discovery can amount to an emotional earthquake. A man may suddenly find himself questioning years of marriage, fatherhood, financial sacrifice and emotional attachment.
‘’The biological truth can arrive after years of school fees, hospital bills, birthdays, sleepless nights and the ordinary intimacy of raising a child.
‘’But the child, of course, did not ask for any of this. Experts have urged fathers who discover that they are not biologically related to a child not to respond by abandoning, humiliating or emotionally withdrawing from the child.
‘’The consequences can be particularly severe for children, who may suddenly find themselves caught between adults dealing with betrayal, anger, shame and grief.’’
Yet another striking finding concerns birth order.
According to Smart DNA’s report, boys accounted for 56.1 per cent of negative firstborn outcomes, down from about 64.4 per cent in the preceding period.
The finding takes on particular significance in a society where the first male child often carries the weight of family name, lineage, inheritance and continuity. In such families, uncertainty over paternity can therefore become far more than a private dispute between a man and a woman.
It can unsettle questions of identity and belonging, complicate inheritance claims and, in some cases, spill into legal battles over who truly belongs to a family.
There is also another dimension to the changing DNA landscape: migration.
The latest report found that immigration-related DNA testing fell from 13.1 per cent to 9.7 per cent. Peace of mind tests rose from 83.7 per cent to 87 per cent of all cases.
In such cases, DNA is overwhelmingly being used as a private tool for personal certainty rather than primarily for legal or immigration purposes.
But the most important fact about the latest figures is also the one that must not be lost in the excitement surrounding them.
The 23.6 per cent figure does not mean that one in four Nigerian fathers is unknowingly raising another man’s child. That conclusion would be scientifically and statistically unjustified.
The figures come from Smart DNA’s clients — people who had reasons to seek testing in the first place — and not from a representative random sample of Nigerian families. The laboratory itself has cautioned against extrapolating its results to the entire population.
The 23.6 per cent is a testing-centre negative-outcome rate, not a national prevalence rate. The distinction matters enormously. People who have no reason to doubt paternity are unlikely to walk into a DNA laboratory seeking confirmation.
The population of people who request paternity tests is therefore already different from the population of all fathers.
As Femi Adebola, a professor of sample survey statistics at the Federal University of Technology, Akure, told AFP Fact Check, applying the findings from a single clinic to Nigeria’s entire population would not be statistically accurate because the clinic’s client base is shaped by where it is located and by the characteristics of those who seek its services.
