…I am fed up with the marriage - wife insists

A middle-aged man, Odekunle Odebunmi, yesterday protested in court against the resolve of Funke, his wife of 11 years, to divorce him.

Odebunmi, who came to the Abeokuta Customary Grade II Court, Ake, with four witnesses, declared he wasn’t allowing Funke to leave their matrimonial home despite reports of battery she had levelled against him.

Funke, a mother of two children aged six and three years, had instituted the divorce suit against Odebunmi for alleged frequent fighting, provocation, lack of care and threat to life. At the resumed hearing yesterday, the woman insisted there was no going back on her resolve to quit the marriage.

“I want to live. The beating is too much to bear any longer,” she said, adding she once was rushed to the hospital after he beat her severely.

But Odebunmi denied all the allegations levelled against him. “We have met the church leaders and they had intervened. I am not ready to let her go. She will still be my wife,” he told the court, even as the divorce-seeking wife interjected, saying, “I am fed up. I am the one facing the problem and staying with him. I cannot continue anymore.”

The court president, Chief Olalekan Akande, while adjourning the case to June 1 to allow for family mediation, pleaded with the wife to change her mind in the interest of the two children.