A veteran lawyer has told women in the Upper East Region that the laws of Ghana are in favour of wives walking away with a half of any property singlehandedly acquired by their husbands when their marriages end in divorce.
He made this announcement as a resource person at a one-day training workshop organised by the Widows and Orphans Movement (WOM) on “Sexual and Gender-based Violence (SGBV)” in the regional capital, Bolgatanga.
“Here in the Upper East Region, when they are sharing properties, they think that the woman belongs to the husband’s house.
They don’t give you in your father’s house. When you go to your husband’s house, they also say you are a stranger in your husband’s house; so, they don’t give you. So, you have lost in your father’s house; you have also lost in your husband’s house.
All those things are violence perpetrated against women and the law frowns upon that. When a man and a woman acquire property, the law says it belongs to the two of you.
Once I have married you today and tomorrow I buy a car, that car belongs to the two of us. If I build a house, that house belongs to the two of us. If you also build a house or buy a car, they belong to us.
“In the event that the two are separating as no longer husband and wife, those properties are going to be shared whether you contributed or not. Once you were there and the man had sex with you, you washed the man’s things, you cleaned the man’s room, you prepared food for the man, you bathed the children— all these things, if the man were to be paying you, do you know how much he would pay you a month? That is what we call unpaid care work. And once these things are there, the law recognises that when there is a problem in a marriage and the parties are dissolving the marriage, whether you contributed or not, but once you were husband and wife, they should share it (property) equally,” the Upper East Regional Director of the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ), Abdulai Jaladeen, affirmed at the workshop.
The workshop saw forty female traditional, religious and community leaders trained as “change agents” and tasked to return to their respective communities to defend helpless girls and women against some existing abuses said to be disguised as traditions.
Source: Dailymailgh
