‘I know four men who have slept with my wife’

A young tailor, Mrs. Kehinde Babalola, has pleaded with the Agege Customary Court to dissolve her union with her husband, Mr. Morufu Babalola.

The couple lived together for eight years and they have two children: a girl and a boy.

Kehinde told the court that her husband was always beating her because there was no more love in the marriage. She said she wanted the custody of her children.

Babalola, a meat seller living at 14, Micheal Olufade Street, Meiran, told the court that all the claims made by his wife were false; stressing that he was ready to divorce her.

He said his wife fights with everybody in their neighbourhood, including their landlord’s children.

He said his intervention in one of such fights landed him in police cell, where he spent three days.

He said his wife is adulterous and that he knows four men that she has slept with.

He said he had caught her on four occasions with those men but because of the love he had for her, he overlooked all her unfaithfulness.

He said even after her wife’s relatives came to beg on her behalf because of her behaviour, she still didn’t change and it got to an extent that people in the neighbourhood call her ‘Animashaun,’ meaning a free giver.

He said, “My wife is mentally deranged. I took her to Aro Psychiatric Hospital in Abeokuta, where the doctor told me that she had a mental problem.

“Although it happened in 2009, she still exhibits her madness sometimes, like the time she came to dump my last child on the floor in my yard close to the bush around 11 pm.”

He added that she was travelling to Ilorin with the children when she suddenly got down from the bus, after telling the driver that she wanted to pee, but she entered the bush and never came back until a week later when she was found in Ijebu Ishara.

But the wife denied what her husband told the court.

She said when she had her first pregnancy; her sister took her to a church where they told her that her stay in Babalola’s house would not yield anything but sadness and a terrible illness that would affect her for a very long time.

She said it was her husband who sent her to Ilorin when a cold breeze blew her and she became unconscious.

She said her husband would always sleep at home to monitor her movements when his mates were selling their meat at the market.

“I sell yam on the street and my husband sees all my customers as my concubines. He would beat me every time with the cane he uses on cows,” she said.

Kehinde said she was perfectly okay before she married her husband but became ill after he got to his house.

She said she decided to take custody of her children when she heard a message from a church that her husband’s family never wanted him to marry a wife not to talk of children.

The court president, Mr. Emmanuel Sokunle, told the husband that he should take the children away from his step mother and bring them to court on the next adjourned date.

He said it was a wrong and dangerous thing to take his children to his step mother.

He later adjourned the case till June 17, 2013.