A husband of Kitwe caused murmurs in the Buchi Local Court when he said he has decided to divorce his wife because she has refused to stop congregating at a Pentecostal church. In defence of his suit for divorce, Anderson Mwenya alleged that his wife wakes up at 04:00 hours to pray, which he said disturbs him.

Mwenya was testifying in a case in which he sued his wife, Priscah Chali, for divorce on grounds that she does not respect his decisions. The two got married in 1993 and they have four children together. Mwenya told the court that all was well between them but that problems in their marriage started in 2018 after his wife joined a Pentecostal church.

He said initially, he used to congregate with his wife at Christian Brethren Church but when he went to work out of town for several months, he found that his wife had joined a Pentecostal church upon his return. Mwenya said he felt bad about his wife’s decision to join a Pentecostal church because she never consulted him.

He told the court that he has on several times asked his wife to leave the Pentecostal church but that she has refused to give in and that she allegedly tells him that she would rather be divorced than have her husband stop her from congregating at a Pentecostal church.
“I am the head of the house and if my wife cannot respect my decision to stop her from going to a Pentecostal church, then I would rather have her divorced,” Mwenya said.

Mwenya said he is ready to divorce his wife because she has allegedly chosen a church over him. But Chali refuted her husband’s grounds of divorce and told the court that her husband wants to divorce her because he has found another woman to marry. She told the court that she used to congregate at a Catholic Church before she was married but that when she got married, she decided to join her husband at CMML church.

Chali said after sometime, the church took her husband to court after they discovered that he had stolen some planks and that from that time, her husband vowed that he would never go back to that church. She said this made her join a Pentecostal church but that her husband tells her that it is a devil’s church.

Chali, however, told the court that her husband has found another woman and that he bluntly tells her that he wants to marry her. She asked the court not to grant them divorce because she still loves her husband and that she would like them to take care of their children together. And Buchi senior local court magistrate Elita Bwalya adjourned the case to a later date.