A JOBLESS teacher of Lusaka – a city widely regarded as the country’s epicentre of sexual immorality – has lost his marriage of 11 years after his wife discovered that he had committed adultery with 37 different women.
Steven Phiri’s undoing came when his loyal and submissive wife Sarafina Banda stumbled upon his hand-written register bearing names of all the 37 women from whose skirts he had extracted nectar.
Sarafina then sued to divorce her 35-year old adulterous husband with whom she has three lovely children in the Lusaka Boma Local Court.
According to Sarafina, the most painful thing about the discovery of the list of her husband’s mistresses, was that rather than being remorseful, he told her that there were more women who had not made it to the slaughter register.
During the court hearing which could as well have been a coronation of Phiri as the country’s king of cheating given his iconic extramarital record, it was heard that while his fellow teachers were explaining Pythagoras theorems to learners, the unemployed teacher was using the excess time on his hands to sweet talk himself into the differently-coloured knickers of women of varrying shapes, hues and sizes.
His wife, a resident of Matero township, testified that after being successfully treated for a sexually transmitted infection passed on to her by her loafing teacher husband, she now feared to contract HIV/AIDS.
“My husband does not respect me. One time he came home with dirt from having sex with another woman and at that time I was suffering the syphilis he gave me.”
“After I recovered from that I decided to go to the hospital to check my HIV status and when the results came out negative, I decided to stop giving him conjugal rights because I didn’t want to get HIV/AIDS from his sleeping around with different women,” Sarafina told the court.
“My husband says he has a spirit of prostitution and the devil is the one who causes him to cheat, whenever I ask him about his girlfriends,” she said.
Blaming his philandering ways on the poor devil, Phiri readily admitted to cheating on his wife but pleaded for his spouse to stay saying the problems they were facing as a couple could be resolved.
He said his actions were as a result of human weakness although “some issues” were blown out of proportion.
But at the insistence of Sarafina, the court dissolved the marriage noting that Phiri’s behavior was extremely unreasonable.
Senior local court justice Contrudah Kamono then ordered Phiri to compensate his ex-wife with K28, 800 to be paid in monthly installments of K600 and child support of K1,500 every month and this money is excluding school fees and medical requirements.