‘She slept with my close friend, denied me sex’

“She is an adulterous woman. She always denied me of sex. She told me she won’t allow me to sleep with her again. She frustrated me to leave my matrimonial home many times. I am fed up. Separate us, my lord.”

These are the words contained in the petition that a father of four, Musibau Oladele, presented to a Grade C Customary Court, Oja-Oba, Mapo, Ibadan, seeking the dissolution of his 20-year-old marriage to his wife, Serifat Oladele.

To buttress his claim of adultery against Serifat, Oladele told the court there was a day he returned home about 9pm and didn’t meet his wife in the church she had told him she was going for a service, and neither was she at home.

Oladele further alleged his wife had inscriptions on her waist, which, to him, indicated she had been patronising herbalists and was the reason she was avoiding having sex with him. He added that when he confronted her on her refusal to have sex with him, she accused him of using charms on her and, therefore, wouldn’t allow him have any sexual intercourse with her again.

But Serifat responded that the petitioner was “a pathological liar” who had decided to spoil her name. She denied having sex with any of her husband’s friends as the petitioner alleged. Rather, she said, it Oladele who had been philandering.

She said she started avoiding her husband when she observed he had allegedly joined a deadly cult group, which she claimed could be “dangerous and lifethreatening” to her.

She also accused him of incurring debts in the neighbourhood and defaulting in paying the house rent and children’s school fees.

The president of the court, Chief Odunade Ademola, who noted in his ruling that the issue of infidelity in marriage was one social vice that every member of the society should fight, answered the petitioner his prayer by dissolving the marriage.

Chief Ademola granted the custody of the four children in the marriage to Serifat and ordered Oladele to be paying the children N10,000 as monthly feeding allowance through the court. He also mandated the plaintiff to be responsible for the children’s education and healthcare whenever they requested for it.