THE court battle about how much Lusaka Mayor Miles Sampa should be paying as child support to his ex-wife Mwika Mwenechanya has raged on.
Last April, the court ordered that Sampa be paying K7, 000 monthly but the mayor feels the amount is too big.
He returned to court seeking for the figure to revised downwards.
But Mwika has also gone to court and has filed a notice of motion to raise a preliminary issue in a case in which Sampa applied that the court varies the K7,000 child maintenance he was ordered to be paying.
Mwenechanya has raised preliminary issues and wants the High Court to determine whether or not it is an abuse of court process for her ex-husband to seek to re-litigate issues that have already been determined by the court.
This is according to court documents filed in court on Monday. Mwenechanya had, in this matter, asked the court to cite Sampa for contempt of court and order the Lusaka City Council (LCC), who are his employers, to be making payments of K7,000 monthly out of his earnings for maintenance of the child of the family.
After judge Mwape Bowa ordered Sampa to be paying K7,000 as child maintenance following the dissolution of the marriage on April 23, 2019, the Lusaka mayor defaulted in paying.This prompted Mwenechanya to seek an order that the K7,000 be deducted from Sampa’s earnings and the court allowed the application.
However, the mayor applied that the K7,000 be varied as he had other children to look after. He stated that he had been struggling to provide the necessities of life for his other four children and also his own upkeep due to monthly liabilities or expenses and urged the court to reduce the monthly child maintenance to K1,500.
Sampa stated that his salary income was K20,000 and as a mayor of Lusaka, his personal monthly expenses on food and clothing only was K8,000 and he has four other children who depend on his monthly income.
He also explained that he has a mortgage with Stanbic Bank amounting to K82,036.29, together with acrued interest calculated at 24.75 per cent per annum and that the bank had since sent him a final demand notice on the loan.
Sampa stated that the court found as a matter of fact in its April 23, 2019 ruling that Mwenechanya was an economist at Bank of Zambia who got a monthly salary of over K50,000 without bonuses and she only has one child of the family to maintain.
In response, Mwenechanya filed a notice of motion to raise three preliminary issues that the court should determine whether or not it can be moved to vary ruling on maintenance dated April 25 this year based on the same facts and circumstances, there being no change in the circumstances since the aforesaid ruling.
She also wants the court to determine whether or not it could entertain Sampa’s application when he, being dissatisfied with the ruling on maintenance, ought to have proceeded by way of appeal without the requisite time frame.
Mwenechanya further stated in her affidavit in support of notice of motion to raise preliminary issue that Sampa’s application to vary maintenance order was ill-founded as there has been no change in circumstances and or new circumstances that have arisen since the granting of the ruling in April this year.
She said the court may therefore not vary ruling on maintenance based upon the same facts and circumstances that were presented to the court and upon which the court made its determination and ordered Sampa to be paying K7,000 as child maintenance.
