‘My younger lover must marry me, or refund my investment on him’

A 52-year-old woman, Christiana Ojukwu, has appealed to an Isolo chief magistrate’s court not to allow her lover abandon her without paying her all she claimed to have invested in him. Ojukwu is pleading with the court to compel her run-away lover, Gerald Onuimo, 40, to marry her.  Onuimo was alleged to have moved out […]

A 52-year-old woman, Christiana Ojukwu, has appealed to an Isolo chief magistrate’s court not to allow her lover abandon her without paying her all she claimed to have invested in him.

Ojukwu is pleading with the court to compel her run-away lover, Gerald Onuimo, 40, to marry her. 

Onuimo was alleged to have moved out of the two live-in lovers’ two-bedroom flat at Isolo in the Lagos metropolis to marry a much younger woman on the ground that Christiana was too old to be presented to his family.

 A furious Ojukwu, who said she had spent a lot of money on Onuimo, had then sought the help of the police to help recover from her estranged lover sums of money she claimed to have spent on him, but the later was said to have been evasive as efforts to retrieve the money proved abortive.

City News gathered that Onuimo had once asked for time to repay Ojukwu the sum of N600,000 which she   gave him to establish a business venture. But the promise was said not to have been honoured and, as even efforts by the police to recover the money failed, the matter was subsequently charged to court.

 In court on Tuesday, a visibly angry Ojukwu maintained Onuimo should not be allowed to jettison her finally without refunding various sums of money she claimed to have spent on making him comfortable when the going between them was rosy. The monies included the N600,000 she said she gave him in 2006 to set up a business. 

 Ojukwu gave a condition, though: If Onuimo wanted to be free from paying back to her all the monies she had spent on him, then the court must order him to send away a woman he had eventually married as his wife and marry her.

 In his defence, the embattled lover told the court that he, too, had, after all, offered the plaintiff enough services in kind in lieu of the sums of money she said she gave him.

 He explained that it wasn’t as if his action against Ojukwu was deliberate but that all his efforts to convince his family to accept her as his wife were bluntly turned down on the ground that she was older than him.

 Onuimo pleaded not guilty to obtaining money under false pretence and was granted bail in the sum of N100,000, with two sureties in like sum.

 However, he was remanded in prison custody pending when he perfected his bail condition.

 The presiding magistrate, Mrs A.K. Shonubi, adjourned the matter till November 21, 2017 for trial.