2021
SUPREME COURT
GHANA
CORAM
AI Generated Summary
The Supreme Court of Ghana, per Prof. H. J. A. N. Mensa-Bonsu, JSC, resolved a complex marital property dispute arising from a ‘distance marriage’ between Richmond Boamah-Barimah and Janet Opoku. Boamah sued for title to House No. KW/B/7, relying on an assignment from Dr. K. K. Sarpong and a purported 1998 sale agreement (Exhibit D) that he admitted fabricating to obtain a Cocoa Board staff housing loan. Janet counterclaimed, asserting ownership based on remittances from Germany and extensive documentation in her name. The High Court dismissed both claims and ordered cancellation of Janet’s title; the Court of Appeal then declared Boamah owner via resulting trust, canceled Janet’s certificate, and ordered possession. Critiquing the Court of Appeal’s treatment of the omnibus ground and its reliance on resulting trust, the Supreme Court emphasized clean hands, estoppel by conduct, and the social context of migrant remittances, found the property predated Boamah’s loan, rejected his forgery-tainted case, and allowed Janet’s appeal (except general damages and interest), setting aside the Court of Appeal’s judgment.
PROF. MENSA-BONSU, JSC:-
The events that have given birth to this case evoke the wise observation of the Scottish poet Sir Walter Scott,
“Oh what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practice to deceive.”
This case involves a dispute about the ownership of landed property between a husband and wife and the social fallouts from the economic difficulties that have afflicted the nation over the past forty odd years, leading couples to adopt all manner of strategies, including ‘distance marriages’ to secure their economic well-being and the survival of their families. The cultural assumptions underlying notions of marriage in Ghana, in which a woman is dependent upon her husband, and the husband is the one who has the means to acquire landed property which may be held solely in his name, have come under some strain. In consequence of such assumptions, ownership of, and title to landed property held in the wife’s name is seen as a deviation from the normal, and often interpreted through such cultural lenses as having been conferred by the husband. These assumptions have come under stress from several angles following the economic independence that many women now enjoy. Nowhere is this more evident than in the issues thrown up by the phenomenon of migrant workers involved in international migration. In this paradigm shift, the relationship between husband and wife is less one of hierarchical dependency and more of equal partnership. Usually in relationships involving “distance marriages’ there is division of labour as the balance of economic power shifts to whichever party earns foreign currency, whilst physical representation in the jurisdiction is conducted by the one who is home-based. Such is the measure of trust that the “absentee spouse” must repose in the home-based one that there would be faithful execution of plans and projects agreed upon, that when this trust is abused or betrayed by either party, then many difficult issues arise.
Some of these old cultural assumptions have been brought to the fore by the facts of this case, giving rise to the difficulties that confronted the courts when a husband, upon divorce, brought this action in the High Court for, inter alia, a declaration to title of a house standing in the name of his wife, and upon the wife’s counterclaim for declaration of title already standing in her name. Upon these simple facts, the difficulties in unravelling the true facts of the case have been tremendous, admittedly caused in n