For five years a KZN school principal assumed he had been divorced from his wife, even getting married again. Then he found out that a single digit had rendered the divorce decree invalid.
|||Durban - For five years a retired principal assumed he had been divorced from his wife, even starting a new life with a teacher whom he later married.
But the September 2010 “divorce” granted by the Durban High Court was not valid, he later found out to his dismay.
That was all because of a single missing digit.
The court typist had allegedly omitted the digit from the wife's ID number.
The blunder, which could have had serious repercussions, especially for the husband, went undetected until recently.
The pension fund payouts the couple - the first wife is a retired teacher - received after their “divorce” order was presented to the KwaZulu-Natal Department of Education provided another dimension to this saga.
As they were married in community of property they were each entitled to a 50% share of the other's payout, and received it.
The husband, who wishes to remain anonymous and who has sought the assistance of attorney Maasla Pillay, told POST that it was by sheer chance that he stumbled across the “major error”.
“My (second) wife and I realised that something was amiss with my divorce when we recently applied for visas to take a holiday in Canada. I had wrongly assumed that everything was hunky-dory and that my divorce was finalised in September 2010. I was told by the travel agency with which we had booked our holiday that they needed a copy of my second marriage certificate,” he said.
“When I went to Home Affairs and was told that my first marriage was not dissolved, I was shocked.”
He then sought the services of Pillay. “Pillay established that my first wife’s identity number had a missing digit when the divorce order was typed,” he said.
“If I had passed on, my second wife, whom I married in 2012, would have been badly prejudiced.” His first wife confirmed that she too had only recently realised the mistake.
Pillay, who has been in the legal profession for more than four decades, said this was the first time he had come across such a mistake.
“Home Affairs ought to have detected the error. They are sent copies of the divorce orders and a document called a stats form. The identity numbers and other details of people are on the form,” said Pillay,
A court employee who did not want to be named said it is important that people double-check the information on orders and other documents.
The Department of Home Affairs had not responded to calls for comment by deadline.
POST