…Children accuse step mom of infidelity, discover alleged phone conversations with her alleged lover
…Battle her in court over will, insists she authored it
…Alleged recorder not my voice- step mom
…Says “My husband wrote his will when he was sound, after they disowned him
The sons of former Secretary to Ebonyi State Government, Chief Fidelis Mbam, and his second wife are now at war over the deceased properties.
The two parties are throwing accusations and counter accusations at each other.
In a recent chat with journalists, late Mbam’s second son from his first wife, Maurice Mbam, accused his step mom of fidelity and according to him it was what led to his father’s death.
Maurice on Thursday told newsmen that it was one month after the father’s death that they discovered the woman’s alleged private phone which had audio conversations of her with her alleged lover boy.
He disclosed that in Izzi custom, if a woman starts having extra marital affair and the husband discovers such and continued living with her that the man would die.
Maurice said it was their late father that revealed the alleged phone which was hidden in his room after he died, adding: “One month after the burial, something mysterious happen.
” Our father went to her daughter in dream and opened up a secret. He told my sister that she should go to his sitting place inside his room that she will see a phone, that the phone contains all the illicit plans of the wife. Lo and behold, she went there with my elder brother and saw the phone. The phone was the woman’s private phone and my father doesn’t call her with it only her lover.
“Then we opened up the phone that was when we knew actually that the woman started planning on how to kill the husband long ago. In the conversation you will hear all sorts of things even when the lover boy addressed my father as a wicked man.
So, I brought out this thing (small radio) so that I can play it and you people will listen to the woman’s discussion with the boyfriend. And when they called her in the village, she was accused of having illicit affair.
“In our place if you are engaging in something like that, your husband will die if he knows, so that was what ended up happening. The man refuses talking because he didn’t want anybody to know”.
Maurice alleged that when the late SSG was sick, that their step mom allegedly hid it from them.
“When Chief was sick, he summoned all of us and then we came as a family, asked what was wrong and then he told us that he had gone to India and so many places. We were like how can you have two grown up sons, my elder brother and myself and we are not aware.
“It turned out that our step-mother never wanted us to know that the man was sick and along the line, she came up with a story that she went somewhere and they told her that one of the sons’ who is angry with the father wants to kill him.
“From that one, it was that the second son wants him dead. I went to my father and said if they said I’m the one that wants to kill you, please can you call the person that said it for me to confess so that you can now recover.
“The story later changed that it was now my elder brother. It got to the extent that I had to rush to my elder brother’s house and bought him. The woman said; ‘if you are not the one that wants to kill your father, touch him’. And my elder brother held our father and said, ‘I am not the one’.
“There and then we all agreed with my sisters to take our father for treatment on our own in order to find out what was really the problem.
“We started with the issue of how he will travel to America, by then, my father was already down. It was only me that was free, so I took him from here to Lagos, from Lagos to places looking for visa, until I got visa for him and our step mother that was how they traveled to America and spent two months.
“All medical diagnoses were done and nothing was found wrong with the man. Immediately they came back from America, the woman started that the man should write his will.
Before the man travelled, on his sick bed he called all of us and said: ‘I don’t have anything to share but the little one I know that I have, you this one is your own, that one is your own, and your brothers’ form this woman will take the other one”.
“He shared it so we started fighting for him to survive. Since the sickness had rejected all medical checks, we took him to herbal home. When we got there, the herbal man said that we should keep him there that if he survives from that moment to the next day that he will heal him.
“Our father stayed till the next morning so the man said that he will heal him but that Chief will stay at his place so that he will be monitoring him during the treatment. I still took the pains of driving to that place everyday till after like one month, one morning I was going to see them there, I met them on the road coming back. I asked what was wrong; the woman said that she was tired and couldn’t stay there anymore. She brought the man back and kept him in the house.
“As at that point, our father was still talking. When she brought him to the house, she started the pressure of the man writing his will and when she found that it was not possible, she brought a native doctor who came and did something on the man and the man stopped talking.
Some of the people who were with them told us that much” he claimed.
He also accused the woman of presenting an alleged fake will to them, which he said didn’t have his late father’s signature. He said for a fact, the father when he saw that the sickness was becoming too serious he verbally distributed his properties amongst his children.
Maurice further stated that his step mom also drained his late father’s bank account, adding that what was discovered in his account after his death was N1000.
He added; “in a bid to withdraw the whole money in his account, she went to the bank, arranged with the bank and brought them to the house and they used my father’s thumbprint and her own signature so that she could be accessing money to take care of him. In that way, she withdrew all the money in the man’s account. At a point, it was difficult for us as we could no longer bear her behavior.
” We went to the village, told our uncles what was happening. When they summoned the woman and told her that what she was doing that they were no more comfortable that she has to go and call her people, she stood up in front of everybody and said ‘You people, I have not seen anybody in this family that I can call anybody from my family for, you people are all losers’.
“And then she walked out on the family, when she was about leaving she stopped and said, ‘I don’t want to see any of you near the compound in Abakaliki since you people don’t want me in the village, I don’t want you people in Abakaliki.
“We thought it was a joke, when we sent some of our uncles to go and see their brother, my father, she chased them away and kept this man inside until he had bed sore.
“Somehow, the boy that was looking after him came out and saw me and he started crying that we should find a way and carry our father out of the house that the woman hardly sees him that she has left the husband to die. So we told our brother the Major and he connected his friends. We told them that when they come visiting, that they should insist and carry the man out from the house, that they will take care of the medical bill. That was how we brought out my father.
“The day we brought the man out from the house, the whole of his back was already decomposing.
” Immediately we brought him to the hospital, he started receiving attention and started feeling happy. Even if he couldn’t talk, he was really laughing out loud and you can use your instinct to know that he said thank you.
“We brought a prayer woman to the hospital and the woman said, ‘Chief, reveal to this your children what is wrong. If you reveal to them that they can save you’. But the man nodded his head and signaled that if he reveals it that the children of the other woman will all die. We never understood what he meant and that was how the man later died. But the truth came out one month after his burial”.
He reiterated that during the burial eve, when they wanted to bring the corpse back for some traditional rites before he will be buried the next day, their step mom allegedly ran to a prominent person in the state, complaining they planned to deal with her, that the corpse shouldn’t be allowed to sleep over in the compound.
“We thought it was a joke, we brought the man’s corpse on the wake keep and the Bishop called and said if the corpse sleeps there that they will not bury him tomorrow. Calls started coming so we quickly did the traditional rites that night and took his corpse back to the mortuary. The next morning we brought him back so after the burial, the family did the burial rites again” he noted.
He narrated that the woman allegedly ran away with her children on the Sunday after the thanksgiving service, adding that a week before the burial, they got a letter from the court summoning them for the father’s will to be read.
“We said which will, that they should hold on if there is will, no problem at least let’s morn our father for one year. After the burial, they still came again; we said we are not ready. We wrote them through our lawyer and the Chief Judge ordered us to come.
” We went there and they brought out a will and read the nonsense and then the in the will, none of the signatures was our father’s signature. She turned the will upside down because at the point she wanted the man to write the will the man was already incapacitated. So she went and wrote a will and took it to herself and stamped on it and went and kept it, only to call us to come and listen to what she wrote.
“Imagine in the will my own mother’s property was included. How will you include another person’s property, duly acquired by her in a will? A will should contain the properties of the one writing it. Although we have challenged the authenticity of the so called will in court and I believe justice will be done.
“We told the woman that since she has been insisting that our father wrote the will, let her bring it to his graveside and after telling our father in the grave that he was the person that wrote it, she should go with the will and that if nothing happens to her within one year after the oath, all of us will leave the properties as contained in the will for her, and people will know she was saying the truth. But she refused to do so. Even in the village, the compound where our mother and father was buried, it was willed to her own son. So you can imagine such a will that will give out a general compound that belongs to the entire family. That place nobody owns it, and that is a place she put in the will that belongs to her son”.
Asked why the family suddenly decided to open up on their father’s death after three years, he said that the woman has been using police to harass them, and that she wants to trickily collect their entire father’s property from them.
Stating that the latest one was reporting them to the police that they took over her mill at the rice mill, including the machines in the shop, “that was chief’s rice mil. She said it was given to her in the will, that all the machines there that she was the person that bought. She brought a receipt and told the police to call the number where she bought them, and the people confirmed it according to her, and the police called us that they are going to take over the mill. I told them you people are just joking, if I see anybody that place I will shoot the person to death and go to prison. So that is the one the police has invited us for now.
“She feels that since she did the first one and we let go that she will continue with other properties the same way until she gets them all.
“I’m just recovering from a serious attack likewise my brother, and for such a woman to say she will do everything to recover her late husband’s property is terrible. We want the whole Ebonyi to know the situation and the circumstances surrounding our father’s death. That it was the plan between the woman and the boyfriend”, he averred.
He further said at the time of filling this report they have not identified the alleged lover boy.
In her reaction, Mrs. Joy Mbam, told The Voice during a recorded telephone interview, that her step sons have been unfair to her.
She said that her husband was sick for four years and she took him to different places just to see if he can survive, but despite all her sacrifices, the man died leaving her with four young children to train alone.
The widow stated that her step children deserted their father, while accusing her step son, Maurice of taken her and the husband to a native doctor where she stayed for more than one month.
“The only time Maurice helped when the father was sick was the time he took us to a native doctor at Nsobor biko biko, to one man that answer’s ‘power’. He said that’s where he belongs and that is only the man that can cure his father’s sickness because my husband actually had stroke and was bedridden for some years. I stayed there for a month and two weeks, under a staircase in an uncompleted building.
That was where I was with my husband and my cousin for a month a two weeks.
“When my husband was not responding to the treatment they were given him we came back. Not quite long his friends came from Abuja led by a retired army General Njoku. When they saw him they said it will be better to move him back to hospital again. This was coming after he was taking to India three times, US once, as well as Niger Foundation for years. The governor sponsored us to US and former Governor Elechi sponsored us to India.
“Later on my husband died in FETHA2, in 2018, but before then, they have been showing this believe that a step mother will never be right. They started fighting me when my husband died and they have not stopped till now.
“I’m at the police headquarters as I speak to you now. They collected everything that belongs to me and my children. My husband has a will he wrote when his mind was so sound.
” He wrote his will in 2015, because he saw what was going to happen when he is no longer there. In 2013 they came to the house and said they disowned their father. There was an issue between them and their father, and all of them came to the house and said they disowned their father. I think that was what preempted their father to make a will immediately.
That will was duly registered in court” she stated.
She noted that before her husband’s death when he was very weak, Maurice went to the village and gathered old people and told them that the sickness doesn’t look ordinary, that she was behind it.
“They asked him why he thinks so, he told them that it’s like I’m having an affair with someone else, that’s why his father must have been sick. He said we must go for DNA test or I will swear. He even said that one of my children was not his father’s. I said okay I will not swear, but I prefer DNA test, and I have four children while the other woman had six that all of them will go for DNA, and that the governor of the state will be involved as well the Bishop so that there won’t be any foul play. That was the condition I gave to them and all of them ran away, and that issue died like, Mrs. Mbam narrated”.
She accused her step sons of making use of her business, adding that she bought machine and registered with rice mill, in 2008 and that immediately her husband died they took it from her, and that she reported the matter to the police.
Mrs. Mbam revealed that the most expensive property of his last husband which is in Enugu state was given to Maurice and he is living there with his family, stressing that she is not complaining about it, but that little one that her husband gave her and her children they want to collect it from her.
She said that the so call conversation with the supposed lover was cloned that it wasn’t her voice.
