In Kenya a strange but true story has left a family totally confused.
{{Linnet Mungai who finds herself unable to lay both her mother and father to rest because of a land tussle acknowledges that the position her family finds itself in, is rather peculiar.}}
“I can’t believe it myself,” she told a local private radio.
In the span of two weeks Linnet lost both her parents amid a tussle over land.
“It started when my father Bernard Mungai Kirumba demolished my mother’s house insisting that since they split up 28 years ago, she should get off his property. He said he wanted to move back home with the wife he left us for as he was sickly,” she explained.
Home, being a one and an eighth acre property in Uthiru on which Wambui and her two children, Linnet and Kirumba Junior, lived.
“A week later, my mom who suffered from High Blood Pressure died from the stress at 55 years of age,” she recalled.
But even dead, Linnet said, her father didn’t want her mother on his land, “On the day of the burial, last Thursday, with her grave ready and people gathered, we received a notice of injunction from our father who insisted that she be buried elsewhere.”
And in what she views as karma, her father passed away the same day, “The following morning we got a report that the very same evening he died of a heart attack at 60.”
But even in death, Mungai’s nephew Muchemi Kirumba insists that his late uncle’s wishes must be respected and that Wambui should not be laid to rest on his property.
“Uncle Mungai wanted Wambui to come out of his premises. He got an eviction order and it was served to her and the children sometime in December. But she didn’t leave forcing uncle Mungai to evict her last Friday but one.
That is when he came with the police and the court order and they effected the eviction to the point where he demolished her house signifying the complete severance of their ties,” he narrated.
And so the Kirumba family remains divided on the way forward with Linnet and Kirumba Junior arguing that as next of kin, their father’s land now belongs to them and they should now be free to lay their mother to rest on it.
Muchemi however counters that his uncle’s wishes were clear, “and like a will,” should be carried out to the letter.
“When the question of where their mother should be buried arose, the father was still alive so the view of the children does not come into play. The children overriding the decision of their father would be taking advantage of the dead,” he argued.
“And Kirumba is not the only son. There’s the first born son Kirumba and another daughter from when uncle subsequently married,” Muchemi continued to say.
And the stalemate persists with Linnet and her brother arguing that their father should not be laid to rest until the contention surrounding their mother’s burial is resolved.
Both sides also maintain that they will not shy away from the courts to ensure that justice, as they perceive it, is done.
But as for the injunction Mungai had obtained against the burial of Wambui on his land, Nyamodi explained: “Unless his survivors were to then substitute him with another living party to the suit or his estate as the plaintiff in that suit, that suit then abates and if a suit abates it abates upon the death of the plaintiff and that would then be the end of the suit.”
The courtroom daggers having been re-drawn however, the court’s finding on the dispute should make for interesting reading as debate rages over the rights of women in and out of marriage.
“That would be an interesting question to be determined by court because there is a decision of the High Court in Busia that women are now entitled to matrimonial property.
But I’m sure the more it is tested judicially the more it will be refined and we hope that the courts will then ensure that women don’t enter into marriages simply to walk away with property,” Nyamodi capped off.
{Fresh grave where Wammbui’s body was to be laid}
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