JUDGMENT OF FRANCIOS JSC.
There is only one issue of importance in this matter and that is whether the appellant is entitled to the disputed house No 24, Block B, Asokwa, Kumasi under the beneficial dispensation of samansiw. Two other matters have been debated but they are inconsequential and may be [p.258] dismissed briefly. First, is the appellant's proprietary claim to the disputed house with the correlated request that the court treat the deceased as a trustee acting in her interest whenever title was in issue. The facts belie such a claim. The trial judge made a clear and decisive finding that the vendor-owner sold the property to the deceased who purchased it in his own right. The judge was amply supported by the appellant's own witness, as also the claim pressed by the deceased himself in exhibit C. The rejection of the appellant's claim in the court's conclusion which I quote below, cannot be successfully impugned. The judge said:
"I find that from the totality of the evidence that the offer for sale of the house in dispute was made to the late Joseph Kwasi Prempeh and that he negotiated with the First Ghana Building Society in his own right and not as the agent of the defendant. I also find as a fact that the late Joseph Kwasi Prempeh financed the purchase of the house from his own resources... [T]he house in dispute was the self-acquired property of the late Joseph Kwasi Prempeh."
If the appellant was dissatisfied with this conclusion it is perplexing that she did not cross appeal: see Prempeh v Agyepong [1989-90] 2 GLR 407, CA. Indeed, to invoke the Intestate Succession Law, 1985 (PNDCL 111) to reap a benefit derived from a deceased spouse's estate or even to claim under samansiw is to acknowledge a lack of proprietary interest in oneself, and amounts to an acquiescence in the trial judge's findings. As this aspect of the matter was not reagitated in a cross appeal, it must be deemed abandoned. It cannot be resurrected now.
The second issue, arising from the statutory effect of PNDCL 111, derives its viability from proof of a recognised marriage. The respondent at the trial described the appellant as a mere girlfriend of the deceased who at the time was lawfully married to one Christie. There was no cross-examination of this. The appellant herself, in paragraph (4) of her amended statement of defence, did not put her relationship with the deceased higher than that of "friends'', which made no attempt to answer the averment in paragraph
