Physician contends with ex-wife over custody of children

Dr. Nathaniel Acolatse, a Deputy Chief Physician Assistant of the Ghana Health Service, has requested the Tema TDC court to order his divorced wife to produce a directive that prevents him from having access to his children until the children are of a particular age.

Dr. Acolatse claims that since he married his former wife Mary, whom he had two children with, she has left her matrimonial home seven times in a row, taking along the two out of the eight children in their home. However, on the seventh occasion, she decided to leave behind the two children, who are toddlers.

He disclosed that when Mary, also known as Maria, packed out on the fateful day, he single-handedly took care of the children until some neighbours hurled accusations at her, following which she went to Tema TDC court to seek refuge.

“It’s a long story, but let me summarise it: after marrying Maria, she packed out of the house on seven occasions. The first six occasions she packed out, she went with the children, but the seventh time when she was packing out, she left the children, so I single-handedly took care of the children for two years.”

“When people criticised her for her heartless behaviour, she went to the Tema TDC court to find solace, following which I was invited to the court. The court held that a man cannot take care of children of those ages, so they should be left with the mother instead,” he explained.

Dr. Acolatse said that during the period the two children were with Mary, she kept moving them around different houses until he was forced to withdraw them from their school to enrol them in a boarding school. He noted that he did so by writing to the court to inform them about his latest line of action.

“So I gave the children back to her, but when I gave the children back to her, she was moving from place to place with them, but of course I was just interested in their education. It was when I realised that they were not going to school that I went to the court and wrote to the magistrate of the court. Look on the account of ABCD; I am removing my children to the boarding house because I wish if the school they were in was a boarding house, I would have left them there, and I can’t be paying all this money, and they will not go to school,” he narrated further.

The doctor said that owing to the constant absence of the children from school, he decided to move the children to another school (name of school withheld) when the wife and her stepbrother came on the 16th of December, 2016 to pick up the children, and he thought that the children were taken away for the purposes of enjoying the vocation period and would be brought back right after that.

“The children had been there until on the 16th of December 2016, when she and the stepbrother came to pick the children up to their place. In fact, when they came to pick the children, it was vacation time, so I thought it may be because they had vacated; she was just coming to pick them up so that when school resumes they will be brought back, and so when school resumed and the children were not brought, we started making an attempt to see.

“I go there with my relatives, sometimes with my uncles and aunties, and she will lock the children in the room to prevent my relatives and I from seeing them,” he added.

He said he has approached people he believes Mary greatly respects in the community to speak to her. However, Dr. Acolatse claimed that every time he attempted to do so, he was humiliated and insulted in front of the same people, leaving the issue unresolved.

He stated that what shocked him most was when he phoned to congratulate the eldest of the two children with Mary upon successful completion of his BECE examinations. Dr. Acolatse revealed that this was received with the same insults and shame both from his ex-wife and her father.

He asked Mary to muster courage and declare the real father of the children in her care. He further pleaded with state institutions to order the retrieval of the two children from Mary for the purpose of a DNA paternity test.

Dr. Acolatse disclosed this to the media during a press conference on Monday, July 22, organised by himself at the International Press Centre in Accra.

When The Sikaman Times reached out to Mary to inquire about her side of the story, she indicated that, at some point, the children were given back to her to care for since their ages didn’t allow their father to keep them.

She, however, noted that her ex-husband, per the directive of the court, was duty-bound to send monthly stipends to her for the upkeep of her children, a directive her ex-husband failed to comply with.

She accused Dr. Acolatse of shirking his responsibilities towards the children to the extent of not paying the required fee for the child who sat the BECE, adding that the child didn’t need his congratulatory message.