Saturday PUNCH recently spoke with a number of ladies who have had a not-so-pleasant expereince of catching their husbands sleeping with their maids. First up is Mrs. Adedolapo, a mother of two. She told Punch that she became certain her husband was sleeping with her help when the very respectful 22-year-old housemaid she brought into her home in February 2015 started to “look at me
from the end of her nose.”
She said:
“The main reason I told the girl to come work for me in the first place was because she was very respectful. I met her when I went for an outreach in Yenagoa and brought her to Lagos.
“She did everything perfectly; she was very nice and treated my children well. But after six months, I noticed that if I walked in and she greeted me by kneeling, she would mouth a welcome to my husband with her back turned. I also realised that this did not seem to bother my husband.
Later I realised that her attitude toward me also changed. All the respect went out of the window. Anytime she did something wrong and I got angry, she looked at me as if I was a mere chicken. I also noticed that my husband no longer spoke to her in my presence. If I told her to do something and I scolded her for doing it wrongly, rather than my husband to add his voice, he would look away.
I noticed that she no longer respected or feared my husband anymore. I became really sure something was going on between both of them when I noticed she cooked when we had left the house one day. I got home that evening and asked why she cooked again.
She said oga (my husband) came home in the afternoon and was hungry and she had to cook for him. My husband had never been in the habit of coming home from work to eat in the afternoon. I sent her packing in August last year.”
Mrs. Adedolapo, who works in a travel agency, said she did not confront her husband and neither did she give him any explanation as to why she sent the housemaid packing soon after.
“The surprising thing is that he never asked me why I sent the lady away,” she said.
SECOND LADY works with a new generation bank in Lagos. She told pUNCH that she had been married for 10 years until 2014 when she separated from her husband. Reason? Her husband was sleeping with their housemaid too.
“We have been on this matter now for almost two years. Our families have been trying to settle the matter. But if I forgive him, it is hard to forget. If I could erase what he did from my mind, then I would forgive him completely,” the woman said.
She called herself Mrs. AngryNaijaWoman. She said she would prefer to be referred to as that in this report.
Mrs. AngryNaijaWoman told Punch that she first noticed the sign of trouble when she realised that her housemaid was showing symptoms of pregnancy.
“The girl was 24 at the time. She had been with us for three years. The first week I started noticing some physical changes in her body, I jokingly told her that I hoped she was not pregnant. She said no. But by the third week, I was sure something was not right. So, I took her for a test and it was confirmed that she was pregnant.
I was shocked. I took her home and sat her down to tell me who impregnated her. She first gave the name of a younger cousin of my husband’s, who was staying with us for some time.
I informed my husband and we summoned his cousin, because he had got his own accommodation not long before that. All this while, I was agonising over how my housemaid could be pregnant under our noses, my husband too expressed surprise.
When my husband’s cousin came and we told him what the housemaid had said, he denied flatly that he was responsible for the pregnancy. But surprisingly, he told me that he had actually slept with her a number of times but always ensured he wore condom.
We kept pestering the lady for answers, asking her if any other person was involved. I decided to calm down and took her inside to ask her privately. That was when she told me that my husband also slept with her. I beat the hell out of her but she kept repeating that she was telling the truth.
I confronted my husband and he too pounced on the lady and started beating her for lying against him. Yet, she maintained her stand. I threatened my husband that we would let the lady give birth and do a DNA test on her child. But my friend told me that if I did that, it would be like shooting myself in the foot. I personally took the lady for an abortion and sent her packing afterwards.”
Mrs.AngryNaijaWoman told Punch that the marriage has been strained ever since.
She said even though her husband continued to deny the accusation, she knew in her heart that the housemaid was telling the truth.
Asked why she took the maid for an abortion, she said she did not want to wait to find out the father of the child between her husband and his cousin.
“It was clear they were both sleeping with the maid without the other knowing,” she said.
As harsh as it may sound, Mrs. AngryNaijaWoman’s case is one that has become all too common.
THIRD WOMAN, a middle-aged woman named Kabirat Jimoh, in November 2015 approached the Oshodi Customary Court in Lagos over her husband’s cavorting with their housemaid. But the husband allegedly took the affair a notch higher.
Kabirat was in tears as she told the court that her husband, Sefiu, had to abandon his matrimonial home altogether and moved in with the housemaid in an apartment he rented for the teenager.
Kabirat said he allegedly abandoned her and their three children to live in a one-room apartment.
She told the court that they had been married for 17 years. She said she had travelled briefly when her husband started sleeping with the girl. According to her, she only knew something was going on between the two of them when the girl became insolent.
“Whenever I asked her to do a chore, she would look me in the eye and tell me that she was tired. Whenever I threatened to take her back to our village, my husband would threaten to deal with me,” she said.
However, with all these kind stories as the backdrop, Saturday PUNCH found out ways many career women are devising to prevent ‘sexcapades’ between their housemaids and husbands.
Saturday PUNCH spoke with Mrs. Rachael Fasina, who explained that when she found out that many housemaids deliberately go out of their way to seduce their bosses’ husbands, she decided never to leave her housemaid alone at home.
“When I took the children to school in the morning, I took her along with me to work. She would stay in the office till we closed and we went home together. I thought it was better not to give chance to any temptation. But I had to later let her go because people advised that there was no point keeping her if I could not leave her alone at home,” she said.
Fasina said she later opted for a middle-aged house help, who comes around the house in the morning and leaves at night because “that is safer.”
“I don’t want a young lady that would come and wear mini-skirts in my house,” she said.
Another career woman, told Punch that if a man does not have sexual restraints, even the wife’s relations would not be off limit to him.
“If I am going to take a relation as housemaid, I would rather take my husband’s relation,” the woman said.
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