Financial independence is crucial for everyone because it allows you to make important decisions based on your own resources, rather than relying on someone else’s income.
Often, those who are financially dependent — particularly women — lack control over their lives and are more susceptible to various forms of abuse.
*Annah Morema, 56, is one of the few who openly admit that relying on others financially was detrimental to her life and left her in a state of despair.
“I regret not going to school, I stupidly believed that a man will support me for the rest of my life but he turned against me and left me with nothing,” she said with a sigh.
Morema grew up in Winterveld, a township located in the north-western corner of Pretoria.
Explaining her upbringing, Morema said it was marred by poverty and strife following the death of her mother when she was eight and she was raised by relatives.
She said she never had a relationship with her father even though she knew where he lived.
“Things were hard, I dropped out of school when I was doing Standard 5 (Grade 7), things were different then, if you had no money for school fees, you were kicked out of school, they didn’t want to hear any excuses,” she said.
“I stayed at home and met my late husband when I was 16-years-old and we got married when I was 21-years-old,” she said with a smile.
Her eyes became moist with tears as she spoke about her first husband.
“That man loved me and our two children, he did everything in the house while I was a stay-at-home mom. I enjoyed being a wife because he was also a good husband, he also didn’t want to see me cry,” she said.
Morema, who still uses her first husband’s surname, said she lost her husband in 1998 in a car accident and then she bought a house in Mabopane with money from the insurance payout and also started a business.
In 2001, she met her second husband and they got married in 2003.
“When I met him, I used to run a small business, selling cold drinks and operating public phones. When he came into my life, he was good to me, he provided for me and my children, he would buy electricity, groceries and also give me R2,000 allowance. He had a good job as a technician at Eskom.”
Morema said as time went on, her business started dwindling especially the public phone business because cellphones were slowly killing the market.
On the other hand, the cold drink business was unsustainable as there were months sales would be down due to cold weather conditions.
She said she sold her public phones and intended to use the money to attend a sewing and catering school because she already had skills in these areas and wanted to enhance her abilities. Additionally, she wanted to complete her matric and pursue a course in business management.
“I told my then-husband about my plans and he was against it, he refused and didn’t want to hear anything about it, his reason was that he’s providing enough for me and the children and me empowering myself means I’m belittling him as a man and his efforts as a provider,” she said.
“I really wanted to do something for myself, but I didn’t want to be a disrespectful wife, that’s what they tell us before we get married, that we should respect our husbands. Besides, he was providing without fail, so I decided to be an obedient wife.”
Morema said even though she was married to her second husband, he only paid lobola and they didn’t sign at Home Affairs.
“Every time I raised the topic, he would tell me we will do it.”
She said as the years went by, she started to notice that her husband was slowly withdrawing from the marriage.
“He no longer provided like before, I now had tedious a mission of reminding all the time about groceries and things in the house. He also reduced my allowance to a point he stopped giving me the allowance,” she said.
Morema said she also heard rumours that he was dating a young woman in another section but didn’t confront him.
“I started going through his bank statement and that’s when I saw repetitive payments for hotels, restaurants, child maintenance and [the University of South Africa] Unisa,” said Morema.
“When we met, he only had one boy and we lived with the boy, I didn’t know where this child maintenance was going. I didn’t confront him immediately, I gathered evidence for at least six months and when I went to him, I confronted him with evidence. He couldn’t explain any of the transactions or try to defend himself. He just said sorry and I also decided to let it go,” she said.
“After that conversation, he was with me for another year or so, but things were not the same, he was really horrible towards me. I couldn’t leave because we were living in my house. Again, he was the one providing and my children were still in school, so I couldn’t exactly tell him to leave,” Morema said.
“But one day in 2015, he came back from work and took his clothes and told me that he was leaving, I asked him that we at least sit down and talk but he refused. I sent his family a letter asking for a meeting and no one came,” she said.
“He left around May, in October, he had a white wedding and they went to Morula Sun for pictures. He had invited some of my neighbours who were his friends and you know people, they will talk, so I knew everything. One of his relatives who I had a good relationship with, told me that the new wife is a teacher and my ex-husband was the one who took her to school.”
Trying to get an explanation behind the child maintenance, Morema said the relative told her he had a child with a colleague while they were still married, they knew the colleague because he used to come with her during his visits to his mother’s place in Mpumalanga.
Morema said she was not surprised that his mother knew about this woman and encouraged their relationship.
“He also provides for his mother and because of that, she doesn’t reprimand him as she will lose the benefits. And those Unisa payments also made sense,” she said.
“I was hurt, I cried, it was painful, the pain stayed with me for at least two or three years. I tried to be an obedient wife and he betrayed me, he left me with nothing.”
To make a living, Morema said she works at a day-care and his son works temporary jobs.
“I’ve never seen him since he left, but my son has seen him many times with his young wife. They bought a house here in Mabopane, just a 30-minute walk from my house,” Morema said.
“It still hurts when I think about it, because everything he claimed not to want, he did it with another woman, even the house, I wanted us to buy our own house and leave my children in the house I bought, but he always came up with different excuses as to why we can’t get a new house,” she said despondently.
“He was against me going to school, he didn’t want children with me, he didn’t want us to get a big celebration for our wedding, he didn’t want to us to sign for a marriage certificate, there’s a lot, but he did all of these things with another woman, they even have a child together and go on vacations.”
Morema said she tried to pursue the matter with legal aid and annul her husband’s marriage and fight for compensation, but she decided to give up because the lawyers were not helpful.
sinenhlanhla.masilela@iol.co.za
* Name changed to protect her identity.
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