A civil status expert, Mr. Serge Kashama Ngoie, expressed his regret over the functioning of this service in the DRC during a training workshop that has been organized since Thursday, May 2, under the marquee of the Boboto college in Kinshasa Gombe.

Scheduled for 2 days, this workshop is organized by the Urban Division of Interior and Security of the city of Kinshasa, for civil status officers from all the municipalities of the city of Kinshasa and civil society actors.

For Mr. Serge Kashama, "this training workshop organized for civil status officers from all the municipalities of the city of Kinshasa and civil society actors is an opportunity to remind these experts that the acts issued by their service are of such great importance and have an authentic and hardly contestable nature."

A civil status document constitutes the supreme legal proof of a person's state: birth certificate, marriage, filiation, and nationality, for example, he recalled before specifying: "A civil status officer is supposed to know who they are, their function, and their role. They must respect the laws and the family code."

He further explained: "As a public service of the State, it follows the evolution of facts and consequential legal acts on the private life of a person who contracts it."

Mr. Serge Kashama also emphasized: "For individuals, the civil status of persons confers prerogatives in private and public life. In civil law, it is a right to contract marriage, capacity to work, right to inheritance, right to support, birth registration which gives an official identity and access to the enjoyment of other rights. For the administration, the civil status service is a management and planning tool whose collected data allows tracking population trends to plan social investments."

The goal of this workshop is to strengthen the capacities of these personalities by providing them with notions about the functioning of a civil status service.

Boni Tsala