A middle-aged man has faced a permanent setback after the court informed him that the woman he had lived with for 22 years was not legally his wife.
According to a report in The Standard, the man went to court seeking to end his 22-year relationship. However, the court later found that he had never formally married the woman, and thus, for all those years, they had been living together as friends rather than as a legally married couple.
"The couple lived together until December 2020, when the woman moved to the United States. Upset by her refusal to return to Kenya, the man, identified as JTO, went to the magistrate’s court to seek to terminate the relationship with the woman known as AP," The Standard reported.
In the case, which started in a lower court before the man appealed to a higher court, he insisted that he had married the woman in a traditional ceremony without any formal documentation.
The judge, in his ruling, stated that even though they had a traditional wedding, they would have needed to officially register their marriage with the relevant government authorities.
Since the man had not done this, he did not have any certificate to prove that the woman was his wife.
Although the man insisted that he had followed all the customs of the Luo community, he could not provide any evidence of the marriage.
The court ruled that there was no marriage to dissolve as initially, the couple was not legally married because there was no evidence to support that.
"Indeed, by neglecting the registration of his customary marriage, the appellant was barred from seeking to dissolve any form of union he had with the respondent," the judge stated.
Slain Ugandan athlete Rebecca Cheptengei accorded military burial