Joy Wangui works as a health records officer at a county hospital in the lower eastern region. She earns a net salary of Sh. 28,000.

Over the last one and a half years, she has hardly enjoyed the fruits of her labour. Nearly all her salary has been going to a bank loan she took for her estranged husband. “I took a Sh. 800,000 loan to help him buy a second hand matatu. I got a repayment period of 48 months. Every month, I am deducted Sh. 21,661. I only pocket Sh. 6,339,” she says.

When she applied for the loan, the mother of three was convinced that it was in the best interest of her family. “He had been working as a matatu driver. It looked reasonable for him to be his own employer,” she says.

“He did the math and showed me that we would be making a minimum of Sh. 4,000 daily for a single return trip from Kitui to Kibwezi. I was sold.” They agreed that since the loan repayments would be deducted from her salary, her husband would be depositing an equal amount in her bank account every due date.

In the early months of the repayment, he made the deposits faithfully. “There were times he would say he doesn’t have money but he never went a week past the due date. Signs of trouble started to show in the fourth month when he delayed for three weeks.

“In the fifth month, he deposited half the amount and lamented that business was bad. In the sixth month, he stopped making the deposits,” says Joy.

Whenever she asked him why he wasn’t making deposits as they had agreed, Joy says that he would burst into a fit of rage. “Some days he would come home drunk and start beating me up accusing me of soiling his name.”

He accused her of spreading news that he had bought the vehicle for him! “He would blurt out statements like, ‘Unataka kuonyesha watu sina akili ni wewe umeniweka?’ to launch the beatings,” she says. Joy could tell that he was making good money even when he denied. “He started dressing expensively. He even got a new, bigger smartphone that he couldn’t have afforded previously,” she says.

Sometimes he would come very late at night and some days he wouldn’t come home at all. In July, he stopped going home.

“I heard that he was staying with a new woman. I confronted him at the stage and he bluntly told me off. ‘Si ulisambaza habari eti ni wewe umeniweka? Sasa jiweke juu sitakaa na mwanamke kichwa ngumu!’” she says, tears welled up in her eyes.

She regrets taking the loan that has now turned her life upside down. “I wish I knew!” she says multiple times. But this is not enough to stop the leakage her payslip must sustain for the remainder of the loan duration.

“We don’t have a marriage certificate; we were together for barely two years when I took the loan; will the court believe me if I sue? What if I report him and he harms me?” she asks.

As she walks in the streets and goes on about her daily work, no one could tell what she is going through from the brave face she has been putting on. But if all married women could see through her, many would empathize that they have suffered the same predicament in one form or another.

“I am barely surviving. I have had to move houses and started selling mitumba over the weekends to keep up with rent and groceries,” says the mother of one four-year-old boy.

Money is the soft underbelly in most marriages in Kenya. It is the biggest violator of trust in marriages especially when it comes to lending soft loans to a spouse or taking bank loans on behalf of a spouse. Unfortunately, the majority of spouses realize this when it is already too late.

Many married career women have had to contend with losses after lending their partners or taking loans on behalf of their partners. This trend is not about to end. The number of defaults is rising in banks pushing people to unofficial lending sources such as including spouses.

Borrowing from a spouse and lending to a spouse makes the perfect sense. For many women, lending their spouse saves the hustle and charges of going the traditional bank loans way. However, this borrowing and lending within marriage has a major loophole.

Amidst the kindhearted gestures of lending to spouses, some women have lost both money and the properties they toiled hard to acquire after their husbands used them as loan security on bad debts then defaulted.

Christabel Ayub might soon become one of these women if she doesn’t find a solution to her predicament fast. She says that she is on the verge of losing her matrimonial home after her husband used it to secure a bank loan for the purchase of a Mitsubishi Fuso Tipper.

“My husband got caught up in the craze for tipper trucks in 2019. Two of his friends had taken loans and bought Tata Tippers. They convinced him it was a good business. I objected because we didn’t have money to finance the purchase or repay the Sh. 8.2 million loan for the truck,” says Christabel who is a high school deputy principal.

Christabel told her husband not to buy into the hype since he was jobless and didn’t have a supplementary income to repay in case the transport business went burst. But as the head of the family, her husband had made up his mind.

He went behind her back and secured financing for the truck using their ¾ acre land where they had constructed their four bedroom bungalow home. He took the loan from a micro-finance.

Christabel, who is 48, recalls the conflict of emotions that struck her when the truck rolled into their gate in December 2019. “I didn’t know how he had managed to secure financing. I wanted to be happy for him but I knew it was a terrible idea,” she says.

She would later fly off the handle when she realized the cost at which the truck had been secured and the risk her family had been exposed to. “Apart from giving out our title, the loan wasn’t on a reducing balance. The market was saturated with similar tippers and there was no way he would make Sh. 208,226 monthly payments for 60 months,” she says.

Four months later, Kenya went into a lockdown. Business went down. Her husband started struggling with repayments. He applied for a loan restructuring.

“They gave him a grace period but secretly kept piling the penalties and charges for the six months he didn’t make penalties in 2020,” says Christabel. When payments resumed, the truck became the source of their fights.

“We were being slapped with heavy penalties whenever he failed to make a payment. We had kids in secondary school, and now I was almost the only one handling the household budget,” she says.

Nearly two thirds of the money they had repaid at the time had gone into settling penalties, insurance and charges. On top of this, their tipper was becoming a regular garage visitor due to poor maintenance.

In March 2022, her husband ran away from their home with the tipper. “I told him to sell the tipper off and find ways to clear the balance but he said I was henpecking him. Our fights got so bad. We stopped sharing the bed. He became an alcoholic, and in March he stopped coming home,” she says.

He has been spotted in Nyahururu town multiple times. But that is not Christabel’s biggest concern. He has not been repaying the loan and now the micro-finance is after her home. “Mid-September 2022, I received a letter of notification dated September 12 that they want to auction off my home,” she says.

“I contributed the biggest chunk in buying this land and constructing this home and now I am about to lose it all over a loan I didn’t apply for.” Even if she wanted to take over the loan, her pay-slip wouldn’t keep up with the payments.

“I don’t have a helper. I can’t keep up with payments even if I wanted to. Everything I was afraid of when I told him not to take the loan has come true. I am about to lose everything I have worked for all my career life,” she says, her voice breaking.

What options does she have? A Court of Appeal landmark ruling in favour of Elizabeth Wanjiru – popularly known as ‘Shosh’ in the Mother-In-Law local Tv programme – shows that the move by the micro-finance to auction Christabel’s property over the loan her husband took might not be entirely legal.

According to this ruling, a spouse cannot use matrimonial property to secure a loan without the consent of his or her partner. This case involved Wanjiru’s former husband Shem Bageine, Housing Finance, and a third party buyer, Mugo Muriu Investments Ltd. The Court of Appeal ruled that Housing Finance had failed to verify whether Bageine had sought his wife’s permission to take up the loan.

Court documents showed that Wanjiru and her husband had acquired the home in 1981 through a mortgage that was given by Housing Finance. The home was registered under the husband’s name. Wanjiru contributed in buying the property. The two repaid the mortgage in full in 1984.

When the two separated after repaying the mortgage, Wanjiru’s husband took a Sh. 600,000 with Housing Finance and used their home title deed as security. He then failed to repay the loan. In 1987, but I amallegedly refused her offer. The house was transferred to its new owner Mugo Muriu on June 10, 1988 who started demanding rent from Wanjiru.

She sued Housing Finance and her husband for taking the loan with a property she was part of without informing her. After 29 years of contestation, the Court of Appeal ruled that the interest of a spouse to a property acquired jointly cannot be overridden by that of a lender to recover an unpaid loan.

“Anyone who lends money on the security of a matrimonial home nowadays ought to realize that the wife may have a share in it… It seems utterly wrong that a lender should turn a blind eye to the wife’s interest or the possibility of it and afterwards seek to turn her and the family out on the pleas that he did not know she was in actual occupation,” the Court of Appeal ruled.

It is not all men who ran away after defaulting. Some stay out of comfort that nothing can be done unto them. When we asked Victor Gitonga if he would pay back his spouse’s loan, his answer was blunt. “I would if she paid me back for taking care of her and putting a roof over her head,” he said.

He admitted that multiple times he has borrowed soft loans from his wife who works as a primary school teacher without any intention of ever repaying. “We have argued over my non-repayments, but I always put my foot down. I am the man of the house. I am the family’s financial overseer,” he says.

According to psychologist Ken Munyua, this blatant default is disregard on the other spouse’s need for financial freedom and can be the spark for other marital problems.

“It is from such disregard that you might find the wife resulting to conjugal denial, which triggers a host of other problems. Intimacy problems plus financial problems are a very toxic mix,” he says.

Getting to the actual reason for borrowing and wiggling your way around it can help you nip a possible default and confrontation.

For instance, says Munyua, when you want to borrow money from the bank, you will be required to state the reason why you want the money and justify you will repay it. The same case should apply when considering whether to lend money to your partner or not. Establish whether your partner has a valid and urgent need that requires a loan.

This should help you come to a conclusion on whether to lend him or not.  “For instance, does he need a soft loan to gamble, take a vacation or even invest in projects that never break even?” says Munyua. If you don’t feel comfortable with his reason for borrowing, do not hesitate to turn him down.

“If he says he is running a tender, ask to see the LPO to the tender, and if he produces it, suggest that there are lenders who fund LPOs at a small interest who he can consult first.” Munyua adds that before you get to the lending part, the marriage should have a sense of financial individuality.

“Every spouse must first appreciate that whereas it is ‘their’ money, each person has the right to direct how their share of finances will be utilized,” he says. “This also means that each spouse should understand that whereas the other might have more money, they might also have other individual money needs.”

If the money is a substantial amount, Munyua says that you should ask what’s in it for you. “The bank gets interest, what will you get if you act as the lender?” he says. Ask your partner if he has tried to get the money from other lending channels such as his bank.

According to marketing consultant Jacqueline Curtis, chances are that your partner may already be deep in debt and cannot qualify for a bank, sacco or chama loan. “You should also make it clear that if you are going to consider lending money, you will require full financial disclosure,” she says.

This includes a bank statement. If the money was part of her monthly budget obligation, the spouse can meet that obligation on due date without necessarily making an actual payment,” says Munyua. If you decide to lend your partner some money, bear in mind that your partner may very well default on repayments.

“Even the most well-meaning person might fall on bad times and default. Ask yourself whether you’re okay with that,” says Curtis.

Rushing to open joint bank accounts early on in the relationship has also been costly to women. This is what Damaris Masinde did. When she started dating, she had this vision of a financially open relationship.

“I knew money was a big issue in relationships and wanted to get it right. I wanted to know what my partner earned and that his income came into our account,” she says. She proposed for a joint account with her fiancé. They both dug out money from their individual accounts and deposited into the joint account.

“He deposited Sh. 80,000 while I deposited Sh. 120,000.” But she forgot to stipulate that withdrawal must be in presence of both account holders. Within three months, her fiancé had withdrawn Sh. 170,000 which he could not account for.

“We had a major fight and nearly called off our wedding,” she says. “Even though we were able to patch things up, it still hurts that he betrayed my trust. Today, I am very reluctant to put my coins in his jar unless I partake in the spending. I cannot lend him money because I know that he will not repay.”

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According to Psychologist Dr. Chris Hart, running one primary joint account will expose you to bigger risks.  He says that you should have three bank accounts. These will include a private account for each of you, and a joint account which you use to manage your household and relationship expenses.

Some women have devised new ways of shielding themselves from defaults by taking stakes in their husband’s ventures. Joselyn Kabugo says that she has no problem lending her man cash because of the way they have structured their finances.

“I do not structure it in a way that says ‘pay-me-back’. Instead, I get a stake in his business so that if he succeeds, I also succeed. If he wants to repay, he can buy me out,” she says. For this to work, Joselyn and her husband have mutually agreed that they will not borrow pocket change from each other.

“When he wants funding, I know it is not Sh. 1,000 or Sh. 20,000. It is an amount that might require me to get a quick bank loan or offload one of my investments if I don’t want to labour with a bank loan,” she says. “I strongly feel that there should be financial systems for supporting each other to prevent couples from acting like Shylocks.”

There is also another catch to the efficiency of this system. “It wouldn’t probably work if I had the money and he didn’t. We needed to be along the same wavelength financially,” says Joselyn. She is a senior bank manager and her husband is an engineer in private business and an immediate former County Executive Committee (CEC) member.

Joselyn cautions that where the man is borrowing from the point of financial imbalance, the rate of default and money fights will be higher.

“The man is more likely to be doing trial ventures and investments. He’s more likely to end up with losses that profits which raises the risk of default,” she says. “His defaults, lower financial wherewithal, and constant fights will be the perfect recipe for a toxic relationship.”

On the opposite extreme, a man who is at par with you financially is more likely to be clear on what he wants the money for and the return on investment which you can tap into.

“He won’t take a Sh. 5 million loan to try potato farming, but he will take the same amount to fund a tender project because he knows how to push for payment and the higher rate of profit,” she says.

According Sheila Sabaya, an Advocate of the High Court who specializes in family law, it is almost impossible for an aggrieved wife to make a claim that her husband has defaulted on money she gave him.

“If the couple is legally married under the recognized forms of marriage, the man and wife are considered as one. The law views that the right hand cannot therefore steal from the left,” she says. For instance, if you take a bank loan under your name to fund your husband and he misuses the money, you cannot force him to repay because you understood the risk.

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“This is the equivalent of what is referred to as volenti non fit injuria under the law, which implies that you consented to run a risk. You knew the risk of default but carried on nonetheless, and will therefore have to figure out how to repay your lender,” says Sabaya.

However, if the woman took a loan and gave the husband the money for investment, and she can show where the money was invested (for example a property) she can make a legal claim if the marriage is dissolved. “This will be done as a claim to matrimonial property for which she contributed,” says Sheila.

Where the couple is not legally married, Stefanie O’Connell, a financial advisor and author of Broke and Beautiful, says that you may consider a promissory note – which in worst case scenario can be legally enforceable.

“Both of you should make a plan on the amount of money being borrowed, how it’ll be used, and when it will be repaid, where the money is going, and then put it in writing,” she says.

However, Sabaya cautions that this mayn’t work within the marriage context as a court of law may prohibit you from testifying against your husband when still legally married.