Deadbeat dad faces jail over R612k child support debt
A father has been given 14 days to pay up or risk going to jail after racking up R612,000 in child maintenance arrears.
The man stopped paying child support for his three children six years ago following his divorce.
The Free State High Court found the man in contempt of court and sentenced him to 60 days in prison but suspended the sentence for two years on condition that he comply with the maintenance order.
If he fails to do so, the court has authorised a warrant for his arrest, with police ordered to take him to prison.
The judgment handed down on Thursday by acting judge Mandlenkosi Mpama lays bare the bitter relationship between the former couple, whose dispute over maintenance of their three children has been dragged through various courts for years.
The couple divorced in August 2018, with the mother awarded primary care and residence of the children.
The father, who has since remarried, was given access to the children and ordered to pay R9,000 a month in maintenance.
But their maintenance problems began before the divorce. In 2015, the mother approached the magistrate’s court and obtained an order for emergency financial assistance. In November 2017, she obtained another order directing the father to make interim maintenance payments.
By the time of the divorce, he was already R58,000 in arrears. The couple agreed that the arrears would be settled through payment of their children’s school fees.
The settlement was later incorporated into the divorce order, together with the R9,000 monthly maintenance obligation.
But the agreement did little to end the conflict. Judge Mpama described the relationship between the former spouses as “demonstrably hostile”.
Their feud spilt onto Facebook, email and WhatsApp, with the court record containing more than 1,000 pages of derogatory and insulting messages between them.
The hostility also extended to their lawyers, with the mother’s legal representatives applying for a protection order against the father on allegations of harassment and seeking an interdict against him.
Despite the years of litigation, the maintenance remained unpaid. In December 2021, the court ordered the father to pay R6,000 a month as an interim amount for the three children.
He paid R6,000 in December 2021, February 2022 and April 2022 and then completely stopped.
Criminal charges had also been pending against him in the Pretoria magistrate’s court over his failure to pay maintenance. By the time the latest application was before the high court, the mother said the father owed R612,000 in maintenance arrears.
According to the judgment, he did not dispute that he had failed to comply with the orders and never raised affordability as a defence.
“This shows he can afford to pay but elects not to,” the judge said.
“The respondent’s disregard of the court orders and his failure to comply with the maintenance orders were not inadvertent but deliberate and in most instances accentuated by mala fides,” the judge said.
The judge said the father’s conduct had serious consequences for his children.
“For a period exceeding a decade,” the judge said, the mother had approached various courts trying to compel him to fulfil his duties as a father.
The judge said his conduct showed “a total disregard of children’s rights” and that the best interests of the children had been “totally undermined”.
The criticism was even sharper because the man had previously served as a prosecutor and, through the Maintenance Act, had been deemed a maintenance officer. His failure to uphold an obligation he was once entrusted to enforce was described by the judge as a “direct affront to the authority of this court”.
The R612,000 in arrears will have to be dealt with by the maintenance court, which has the statutory powers to handle arrear maintenance claims.
The man has 14 days to comply with the maintenance order. If he fails, the 60-day prison sentence can be enforced and he will be required to surrender to police, who must ensure that he is taken to prison.