Eveline de Klerk
WALVIS BAY - A Swakopmund woman can finally breathe a sigh of relief as the town council resolved to have the particulars of her bigamist husband removed as co-owner of her Build Together house in Mondesa.
Aune Nghinanamunhu (52) has been struggling since 2019 to be the sole owner of the house she bought from the council in 2010 as she feared he would one day come back and demand co-ownership of the house she has been paying for by herself.
Narrating her ordeal to New Era yesterday, Nghinanamunhu said she married Gerson Walaula on 9 February 2007 in the Walvis Bay Magistrate’s Court, not knowing that he had already married another woman in 2006.
“I only found out in 2010 when I gave birth to our daughter. He did not come to see us in hospital, but his sister did, and told me that he was moving to Angola with his first wife”, she narrated yesterday.
She thus opened a case of bigamy on 13 December 2016 against him at the Walvis Bay police station after finally getting proof that he was indeed married. She also approached the Swakopmund town council in 2016, where her husband admitted that he was already married.
He allegedly left shortly after admitting that he was married. As a result, she had to withdraw the case on 6 March 2019, seeing that he could not be traced by the police.
“My biggest fear was that he would one day come back and claim my property, as he had co-signed the documents. That is why I approached the municipality in 2019 again to have him removed from all my paperwork,” she continued.
Nghinanamunhu added that she has in the meantime also extended her home, and did not want him to benefit from her hard work. “It was really a struggle to have
him removed, as the process was also delayed by the Covid-19 outbreak. But I am finally happy that council has resolved that he be removed from the property so that I can be the sole owner,” she said.
According to court documents, Walaula was requested by the ministry of home affairs to provide proof within 19 days that his first marriage was dissolved, but failed to do so. As a result, his marriage to her was declared invalid in 2019. According to council documents, the chairperson of the management committee granted the general manager of corporate services permission to remove Walaula from the property documents, and also requested that the ministry of urban and rural development update the details accordingly.