Liberians in big fight for kids at Kabete home

Top lawyer accuses estranged wife of witchcraft in a sensational child custody case

By Mbugua Ngunjiri

West African Juju, ritualistic killings, murder plots, a bitter divorce, child abduction, international espionage and genocide.

The above were part of an engrossing drama that played  out at the Nairobi  Milimani Court. On one hand was Jerome Verdier, a one-time head of the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission formed to investigate the atrocities that recently saw former Liberian President Charles Taylor sent for 50 years in a British jail by the International Criminal Court.

On the other hand was Mawa Kamara, the woman Jerome divorced just before he fled into exile when the commission pointed an accusing finger at President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf as being culpable for the violence that rocked Liberia.

The two are at the Children’s Court fighting for custody of an 11-year-old boy and a five-year-old girl, who were staying at the Kabete Children’s Home.

This is after Mawa succeeded in convincing the immigration department to remove them from the custody of Massaquioi Hawa Gbana, Jerome’s fiancée who had been staying with them in Nairobi while he was processing their papers to join him in the USA.

Mawa’s told the Immigration Department that Massaquioi had abducted the children from Liberia. Massaquioi had, jointly with Jerome, lodged the case in court seeking to deny Mawa, the children’s mother custody of the children.

But Jerome, in his sworn affidavit, said he applied for and obtained custody of the children in August 2011 before fleeing to the USA.

“It was the lies of the Defendant to Kenyan Authorities that formed the children to be ejected out of their stable home in Kenya, where they have lived with the second Plaintiff (Massaquioi), to a children’s home for orphans…” says Jerome, who says his ex is unfit to be a parent and a mother.

In her replying affidavit Mawa says that she had the custody of her children until August 10, 2011, when she left Monrovia, Liberia for a nursing seminar in the USA “that the First Plaintiff (Jerome) went to my sister, under whose care I had left my children, and took them by force”.

But Jerome says she left the children with a friend at whose place alcohol and drugs are sold and casts his former wife as a witch given to participating in dark rituals.

He claims that their first daughter Watta Sonii, 25, was mysteriously killed on November 6, 2012 “to break his (Jerome) spirit and that his ex is a “traditional Zoe who conducts Female Genital Mutilation…”

His ailing daughter Watta, Jerome says, died immediately her mum, who had just come from a foreign trip, set her eyes on her. The trip, to Italy, was a fetish to kill him “after all other efforts (motor accident, poisoning, ambushes, etc) by the Defendant and the Government of Liberia failed”.

It gets more weird: “When the Defendant left on her trip, nearly all my underclothes and those of my elder son went missing,” Jerome says.

He adds that when he ordered for a “thorough sweep and clean-up” of the house, he discovered a black bag containing an assortment of fetish objects at the back of the head of the bed, which his wife said was “protection” that her mother brought her from Mecca.

Jerome, in his affidavit, said his sister-in-law told him that Mawa and her mum had been making cow and sheep sacrifices with his money, and that the sacrifices were the reason Jerome’s daughter, whose custody was being contested, “is always sickly”.

The court was further told that prior to her travel, Mawa had allegedly told the couple’s eldest son “I am making my trip and on my return I will deal with your father and you will never recognise his as your father…”

Acting Principal Magistrate Kinuthia Mwicigi noted that it was apparent that the couple’s differences clouded their ability to make decisions aimed at safeguarding and promoting the welfare of the children, noting in particular that the kids had not attended school since leaving Liberia.

Ruling that there was no evidence “to indicate that the defendant was responsible for Watta’s death”, he ordered that the children be released to Mawa and that each party bear their own costs.