An 18-year-old marriage between one Mr. Jonathan Ubi and his wife, Rita, was Wednesday, dissolved by an Igando Customary Court, Lagos, after Ubi accused his wife of disappearing.
According to reports, the 65-year-old petitioner, a retiree, had filed a suit seeking for the dissolution of his marriage after alleging that the wife had committed an abomination.
“My wife committed an abomination by willingly abandoning her matrimonial home for four weeks to an unknown destination. She stopped caring for me and our children; instead, she left everything in the hands of our maids.
“In my tradition, it is a taboo for a wife, who abandoned her matrimonial home to come back. I cannot marry or have anything to do with her again,” he said.
Ubi went further to explain that his wife was lazy as she could not take care of her family.
“Because of her laziness, I enrolled all my children into boarding school as their mother cannot take proper care of them.
“She recklessly mismanaged the business I set up for her and she is always asking me for more money,” Ubi added.
Ubi, however, begged the court to dissolve his marriage to Rita as he was no more in love with her and was also not willing to live with a woman who commits so many atrocities.
His 40-year-old wife in her defense said it was her husband that chased her away from the house after threatening to bath her with acid.
“My husband chased me from the house. He said that I was irritating him and threatened to kill me by pouring acid on me if I refused to leave his house. So, at that point, I had no option than to move to our church to tarry while waiting for his temper to cool down”, she claimed.
The 40-year-old businesswoman further explained that the elders in the church begged him, but that he said he could not accept her back because she had committed an abomination by sleeping outside her matrimonial home.
Rita added that, “My brother-in-law always accused me of using charm on my husband so that he will love only me and my children and abandon them (his family). My husband’s family have been trying so much to destroy my home by accusing me of being fetish.
“It is this same in-law that instigated my husband to reject me after insisting that I was not a good wife.”
“I have always taken good care of my husband and our children,” Rita added and pleaded with the court not to grant her husband’s wish as she was still in love with him.
The president of the court, Mr Hakeem Oyekan, in his judgment, said he was convinced that the couple could no longer live together as the petitioner insisted on the divorce even after several interventions.
“The court has no choice than to dissolve the union in spite of the fact that the wife still claims she loves her husband. The couple can no longer stay together because the marriage has broken down totally, both parties are no longer husband and wife, they are free to go their separate ways.
“Both parties are to keep peace all the time, any violation of the order should be reported to the police for redress,” the Court president ruled.
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