‘Her lover sleeps overnight in our bedroom, threatens to kill me’

A customary court at Mapo, Ibadan, has dissolved the 14-year-old marriage between Abimbola Idowu and his wife Folashade.  Folashade, a teacher, in her divorce petition, had described Idowu as a quarrelsome husband, saying he once chased her out of the home for three weeks.  She further said Idowu also once beat her to the extent […]

A customary court at Mapo, Ibadan, has dissolved the 14-year-old marriage between Abimbola Idowu and his wife Folashade. 

Folashade, a teacher, in her divorce petition, had described Idowu as a quarrelsome husband, saying he once chased her out of the home for three weeks. 

She further said Idowu also once beat her to the extent that she bled profusely, though he later came to beg her at her father’s house on Iwo Road, Ibadan, where she said she had taken refuge.

The mother of three alleged her husband denied paternity of the last child of the family.

But reacting to the petitioner’s allegations, Idowu, a factory worker, described his wife as a pathological liar “who can make a mirage looks like the real thing.” 

He admitted he slapped her “because she brought her lover to our matrimonial home”, as allegedly confirmed by many people in the neighbourhood. Idowu said his neighbours, friends and children had told him many times that whenever he went to work on night shift, his wife used to bring a man to sleep in their matrimonial home.

The respondent alleged that his wife’s concubine, whom he claimed was always eating his food because he was “a jobless man who lives on whatever he gets from my wife”, threatened to kill him.

The president of the court, Chief Ademola Odunade, dissolved the marriage and granted the custody of the three children in the marriage to the petitioner. 

Odunade ordered Idowu to be paying the children N10,000 monthly as their feeding allowance through the court and urged him to be responsible for their school fees, health and well-being.