The wife of the deceased in this matter, married under the customary law, applied to this court for letters of administration to enable her to administer the estate of her deceased husband and particularly to enable her to obtain the gratuity or deduction made under the social security fund. According to her, her late husband died leaving nothing in the form of property or cash because he had spent all his money mainly on drinking. Because of his inebriate habits, according to the applicant, the deceased had been given up for lost by the members of his family and none of them came anywhere near him. The deceased had six children with the applicant and most of them are still at school. It was in fact to enable her to pay their fees and to maintain those children that she sought the permission to administer the estate and to be able to claim the gratuity.
The defendant brought it to the notice of the court that her husband died on 24 August 1971 and that before he was buried the plaintiff in this case had gone to the employers of her late husband and collected the salary of the deceased for the month. When he did that, according to the defendant, the plaintiff never informed her nor did he give her and the children any part of the money. He did not even stop to consider whether or not the rent for the rooms they occupied had been paid, let alone consider how she and her children would live. The defendant [p.101] deposed in her affidavit in support of her application, inter alia, that the plaintiff is unemployed. The plaintiff disputes that fact and states in his affidavit that he is a cocoa farmer and that he reaps not less than 200 loads of cocoa per annum. I did not go into that matter as no evidence has been taken. But I doubt that a person of the plaintiff's standing earning about £G800 or ¢1,600.00 per annum from his farm cannot afford, as will be seen presently, to bury his dead relation to whom he has succeeded without recourse to the deceased's salary for the month in which he died.
To begin with, the plaintiff took out an originating summons. When the matter was being argued, he issued the present writ. I granted the application of the defendant and ordered letters of administration to issue in her favour. It was as a result of that order granting the defendant's application that the plaintiff started these present proceedings calling upon the defendant to produce the letters of administration issued to her for them to be cancelled. The main gro
