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A couple in Tana River county was forced to cancel their wedding when a man claiming to be their father emerged just as they were about to walk down the aisle.
Anne Magwi and Jotham Munini who were supposed to exchange their marriage vows on Saturday, September 5, are reported to have been raised by single parents. However, a report by Daily Nation showed their alleged father, alongside his sisters, stormed Holy Redemption Ministries to stop the wedding terming it an abomination.
According to Pastor Festus Muli, the man claiming paternity for the couple said he had sired children with the women involved in the wedding before they parted ways due to various reasons. “He said one of the children, the groom, was sired in an informal relationship that did not end well,” said pastor Muli. “The bride was conceived from the woman with whom he had a clandestine relationship at the time,” he added. The pastor further said the man, James Sidai, claimed after the wife discovered he was having an affair, their relationship became toxic and she fled with their child, who was just a year old then.
It was then that he tried to build a stronger relationship with his other lover only for it to end due to financial constraints which triggered frequent misunderstandings. The man of God revealed the man’s lover left with a four-month-old pregnancy, and would later get married to a school teacher a year later. Sidai is said to have produced photos of the two children when they were young and when in college, which he had obtained from friends and relatives who had interacted with them.
“This man married and has three children with the current wife, but has never been in contact with the children he sired out of wedlock,” said the man of God. “He learned of the wedding through a friend who also shared it on a certain WhatsApp group. That is when he decided to make this trip and trace the church,” said the pastor. The man had been trying to trace his children for the past 10 years in vain as his efforts to reach some of the friends of the first wife did not yield fruits.
In the case of the said daughter, he was informed through friends that the woman had delivered a baby girl resembling him and had settled down in life. “He saw the daughter once in the same school his children attend but he did not know how to go about it since the other father was visiting,” a nephew of the man was quoted. “He never saw her again after completing her primary school education. All he wanted was to save their lives and forestall a looming calamity,” added the nephew. The pastor was forced to call off the wedding and summon the parents for talks after he was informed by one of the pastors of the new development. The groom, according to the pastor, was informed that the father died in a road accident when he was young, while the bride grew up knowing the teacher, who has since died, was her father.
“The women did not deny knowing the man, and neither did they deny paternity. We sat down the couple in the nick of time and explained things out,” the pastor noted. To save the family from shame, the pastor told the guests the church leadership had resolved to call off the wedding. The people attending the wedding were told the couple had defaulted guidance from church elders with regards to purity before a wedding.
The groom, a businessman in Madogo town, is said to have walked out of the meeting an angry man and drove away in his car leaving his mother in tears. The bride, on the other hand, was whisked away with her mother and relatives in another car.
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