Man demands dowry refund after divorce

By PAUL KARIUKI

A furious man who separated with his wife close to a decade ago, cause a stir when he confronted his ex wife‘s parents demanding that they refund his dowry considering the marriage didn’t work out.

Wanyororo‚ a village resident in Bahati District, Nakuru County, married a stunning beauty at a lavish church ceremony in 2004. However, their marriage only lasted three months and efforts to reconcile the two bore no fruits. His frantic effort and pleas to get back his dowry fell on deaf ears.

Wooing

So devastated was the jilted lover that he unsuccessfully attempted suicide. After a while, he re-married but his new marriage, too, fell apart in less than a year. Gossip, courtesy of his first wife, infuriated him that he began doing rounds. What gave credence to the gossip was the fact that he had no kid out of the two women, prompting area residents to nickname him baba zero.

No woman would agree to commit herself to him, after such humiliation. The ostracisation led him into self-exile in Tanzania, where he was holed for close to three years before returning home.

Upon his return, he got lucky by wooing a young single mother and later married her. He proved wrong critics who had imagined  he had been ‘shooting blanks’ by siring two children in quick succession.

Tainted

However, he wasn‘t spared the usual slack with rife speculation that he was raising up other men’s wild oats. This further put a damper to his marriage, but the gossip died off as his children are his exact carbon copies.

But the man still had an axe to grind with the first ex wife, especially now that she had been behind his soiled name. He claimed he got a raw deal yet he paid heavily. He doesn‘t believe suing will undo the damage, especially his tainted name. Other than the bride price refund, he insists on also getting back his Sh10,000 that he gave his ex wife’s father as ‘goodwill’, ostensibly to smooth things over during dowry negotiation.

He claims that his greedy in-laws benefited from him yet he did not gain anything from their daughter. He accused his ex-wife’s father of poor parenting. “How can you bring up a daughter who doesn’t know how to take care of her man, and shamelessly goes round disparaging him, damaging his reputation. And revealing bedroom affairs to public,” he wondered, adding: “This woman caused me a lot of mental torture and even occasioned my self-styled exile, I want my dowry back,” he whined.

Unfortunately, to complicate the matter further, his ex wife had been married off elsewhere. His former father-in-law told him off and ordered him out of his compound threatening him with dire consequences if he continued with his rant. The poor man reluctantly walked away with dejection written all over his face, but promised to return with ‘his people’ to teach them a lesson.