A WOMAN of Lusaka’s Kamwala South residential area has divorced her cousin husband at the Boma Local Court because he did not love her.
Ruth Tembo, 44, testified before senior local court magistrate Gaston Kalala that when she got married to Ephraim Daka in 2014, she left her two children and went to live only with him for two years.
“I asked him if my children could come and stay with us, but he refused and told me he wouldn’t allow it. In 2018 my children came but my husband set so many rules that they were not free,” Tembo said.
“He told me to be putting toothpaste on their tooth brushes in advance because they were wasteful,” she said.
Tembo said her husband always complained about her children.
One time when they returned from school, she found that he had locked the house and only opened it in the evening.
“One time he started accusing me of being after his money. He said we only wanted money from him.
Another day my children heard us arguing and they decided to leave home. They told me they didn’t want to be the reason why my marriage would fail,” Ms Tembo said.
She told the court one day she and the husband went for prayers away from home and afterwards he left her there without any transport money.
“At some point we stopped staying together. Our families started advising us to shift, but when I found a house my husband refused to shift. He also used to make excuses all the time I wanted to go to his place to live with him,” Tembo said.
She said she once found pornographic videos in her husband’s phone, which he was sending to a woman whose name he had saved in his phone as ‘My Love’.
“We argued and he strangled my neck when I tried to get his phone. I went to get a medical report from the police and he started threatening to kill me,” Tembo testified.
“We have actually been to court and we were reconciled, but he never came to get me. When I went where he was staying, he didn’t welcome me and told me he didn’t love me,” Tembo said.
Daka told the court he had never enjoyed his marriage to Tembo from the beginning.
He told the court that just after a week, his wife went back to her parents and didn’t return home for three months.
“I didn’t except that my marriage life would be like this. I was expecting us to stay together as husband and wife, but we’ve never stayed together. She is actually my cousin. We got married as cousins,” Daka said.
He said he never even wanted her at first. She was the one who had pursued him.
“She used to follow me until I was forced to start making arrangements to marry her,” Daka said.
He told the court that he had never lived with his wife longer than three months because she was always away from home even when he begged her to go back to him.
“I got tired of telling her parents to tell her to come home. It’s like it was not even a marriage. I am more like a bachelor,” Daka said.
He also told the court that his wife also had intentions of having him locked up so that their marriage could end.
The court divorce the couple saying they had been on separation for a long time and that Daka did not love his wife.
Magistrate Kalala ordered Daka to compensate Tembo with K5,000.
Court dissolves ‘loveless’ marriage
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