Igbo culture on bride price evil – Court declares over paternity case

An Akure Magistrate Court described Igbo custom as barbaric, evil, and ungodly because it denied a father access to his children over the non-payment of the bride price to the wife’s family.

Magistrate Segun Rotiba disclosed this recently when he ruled on the legal tussle between Prophet Theophilus Obayan and his estranged wife, Prophetess Chibuzor Lilia.

Obayan is Yoruba, while his estranged wife hails from Abia, an Igbo state in the southeast.

Obayan and Lilia were heads of the Divine Prophetic Solutions Prayers Ministry, Ladipo, in Lagos State.

Prophetess Chibuzor left her husband to marry one of his spiritual sons, Abua Obi, and changed her children’s surname to Obi.

Obayan filed a divorce suit against his wife because she changed his children’s surname to her lover’s name.

In judgement, Rotiba said: “The custom (Igbo) that tends to punish one person when two consenting adults are involved in the act is nothing but the highest element of insensitivity and servitude.

“In the same breath, I find the Igbo custom exuded by the respondent and her witnesses that the children of the union can bear Mr Abua Obi as their surname, atavistic, barbaric, evil, ungodly, irrational, unsensational, crass, gross, crude, unwary, provocative, ungodly, discriminatory, and insensible.

“The custom that tends to punish one person when two consenting adults are involved in the act is nothing but the highest element of insensitivity and servitude.”