13 Feb 2019

As part of the responsiveness of the courts in addressing the high divorce cases, the High Court is developing a court annexed mediation.

This is a process whereby the two concerned parties would be brought together for mediation before the High Court could grant an order or decree of divorce.

A mediator would be attached to the court to assist the parties to the dispute to explore options and solutions available in order to reach a mutual agreement.

Judge President of Francistown High Court, Justice Lot Moroka revealed this during the launch of a book entitled: Sweet Marriages which he believed would also be a solution to the problem.

The third edition of Edwin Phalane’s book is all about the management of both social and religious marriages.  He said the book would also come in handy to the mediation exercise.

Justice Moroka noted that courts were busy with divorce cases on a daily basis, revealing that the Francistown High Court has eight judges and that each deals with 10 divorce cases weekly.

He stressed the need to find a solution to divorce cases, noting that there were more divorces than marriages in the country.  He asked if it was possible to have 80 marriages weekly at the district commissioners’ offices, and if not, he stated “it means that we are running at a deficit as far as family building is concerned because we have got more break downs than construction of our societal building blocks. We are encountering a crisis as a nation and slowly we will soon fall over,” he added.

Justice Moroka hailed the author for taking a major step in building society, adding that the nation was built in blocks and that marriage was amongst the blocks.

The book, he said, would be a mirror in front of society as it speaks on issues that society confronts on a daily basis.  He explained why marriages break, noting that the laws of Botswana, which govern divorce, state that the sole ground for divorce was when the marriage was found to be intolerable.

He said a man or a woman has to prove four things: That the other party had deserted;  that the other spouse has without good reason abandoned the home or gone away without visitation for more than two years.

The other factors, he mentioned, were unreasonable conduct and adultery. Of all the four factors, Justice Moroka pointed out that the most prevalent was unreasonable conduct where people behaved in an unreasonable manner, living as if they were single when they were married and expecting the other person to believe they were in the marriage, spending money without consulting the other.

“Some refuse to be accountable,” citing a recent incident where a man was brought before court for failing to provide maintenance. The man’s defence was that his mother had stopped giving him money, hence he was unable to support the family.

He described it as masculinity crisis. “We are slowly experiencing a masculinity crisis, a critical shortage of good men. We are running short of good men as their numbers are slowly getting smaller. I focus on men because they have more responsibilities, and if they were men, fewer families will break down,” he stressed.

He said some of the conduct by women was as a result of lack of manhood in men, not in the physical sense, but in the men sense. ENDS