Listen to This Article Enhance your reading experience by listening to this article.

A Nakuru court recently ruled that housework and caregiving by a wife entitled her to half of the matrimonial property acquired by the husband during marriage.

The High Court in Nakuru made the ruling in the MW v AN divorce case. It was deciding what rights the wife held in matrimonial property, in this case a house, that was registered in the husband’s name. 

The law, as it is, holds that matrimonial property shall be divided on dissolution of the marriage according to the financial contribution of each party to its acquisition. 

However, the court ruled that in quantifying the contribution of the wife, the so-called “invisible contribution of housework and caregiving” must be taken into account alongside the direct financial contribution. 

The bottom line is the question of the work done by housewives, and the court elevated this to the same level as actually going out to earn money, invest, and create wealth.

This has opened a whole slew of issues that the court itself cannot resolve — a Pandora’s Box. First issue is why women become housewives at all. 

There are those who decided to raise their children instead of relying on house helps. Others simply don’t want to work because their husbands “provide.”

They spend their days lazying, pampered by servants. For others, their husbands discourage them from working. All these cases cannot be evaluated the same.

Secondly, this ruling sends the wrong message. That a wife can just sit back and “do nothing” while her husband breaks his back for years creating wealth, and she’ll get half if they divorce. Where is the equitability? Gender discrimination cuts both ways.

Thirdly, how exactly do you quantify the so-called “invisible contribution of housework and caregiving?”

Where does it begin and where does it end? What of the wife who has spent the entire marriage making her husband’s and children’s lives miserable?

What of the husband who regularly pays his wife “an allowance” because she’s a housewife? 

Who pays for the stress and health problems the husband endures over years of being the sole breadwinner? How is that to count if the marriage falls apart? 

What of when the children become independent and the workload on the wife has been completely scaled back to just an hour a day?

This is simply not the case of a court subjectively deciding the compensation for labour.

For instance, if the husband was a chief executive, is the Court saying that the wife’s “reward” for “housework and caregiving” is at par with his compensation, because the property acquired is directly proportional to his earning power?

One can see that the ruling has flung the country into a tempestuous sea that is completely uncharted.

The country must urgently look for a safe harbor before this judgement becomes the biggest cause of marital breakups in Kenya in the next few years. And this is no exaggeration.

This is not to say that housewives “do nothing.” Neither can it be right that a woman who has had every expectation, and rightly so, of living out her years as a wife being taken care of by her husband be rendered destitute because the marriage has collapsed, sometimes due to no fault of her own.

But this country is yet to have a conversation on this issue largely because the gender brigade is a bit embarrassed that in this day and age, there are women, even well-educated ones, who have made the decision to simply stay at home and become housewives. It flies in the face of every gender empowerment narrative. 

Gender activists must educate women that the culture of housewives is complete at variance with the very concept of women empowerment.

Women must go out there and work! The fight for the opportunity and space to do so is the very foundation of gender activism.

This discussion is long overdue, and this case provides the perfect platform to launch it.

Bringing this in the open will make it a part of those critical decisions couples have to make before they get married, because choices have consequences. — [email protected]