Pretoria - A granny who wanted her son’s body exhumed so that DNA samples could be taken to prove her theory that he was not the father of two boys, was referred to as a “putative grandmother” by a judge.
The granny, who is not named to protect the children’s identities, has been embroiled in litigation with the deceased’s wife and the administrator of his pension fund for years in a bid for the money to be paid to her.
She insisted that paternity tests must be done on the teenage children because she said her son assured her over the years that he was “barren”.
The reason for this, she told the court, was because of “torture” he had suffered under the then apartheid regime.
“He had many girlfriends over the years, but he has never produced children,” the granny told the Gauteng High Court, Pretoria.
She took the children’s mother, the Department of Defence and Military Veterans for which her son had worked, and the Government Employees Fund, to court.
She wanted to halt payments to the widow and her children until paternity tests were done “to prove they are not his children”.
Her son died in July 2011 while employed by the SANDF, and since then the legal tussle over the pension money has raged.
A court earlier ordered that the fund might pay the money over to the widow and children.
But the granny subsequently asked that it be interdicted from paying until paternity had been established.
The granny said in the alternative, if the pension money had already been paid, no one should be allowed to touch it until the matter was resolved.
She told Judge Vivian Tlhapi that she would make the arrangements to exhume her son’s body, and the mother must just ensure that the children were available for blood tests.
The granny said that if the mother did not ensure the children were available and ready for the DNA tests, it must be ordered that they might not benefit from her son’s estate.
She alleged that her son left a will in which she was the only beneficiary of his estate.
She said at the time of his death he merely had a relationship with the mother of the children and no children were born from their union.
She said she phoned the woman soon after her son’s death to warn her not to touch the pension money, but the widow would not listen.
The granny said she had not seen the children. She often visited her son at his Sunnyside flat, she said, and there were no signs of children there.
But the widow had a different version.
She said she moved in with her husband – the deceased – in 2004 and the granny on occasions visited them and the children.
She said while the birth certificates reflected her surname, the baptism certificate reflected the father’s.
She said her husband had not once questioned whether he was the father.
The woman said she was not interested in the pension money because the children were the ones entitled to inherit.
The mother also refused to subject her children to a paternity test.
The judge frowned upon the fact that the granny expected DNA to be extracted from the remains of her son.
This, the judge said, was all because of hearsay evidence that her son was not the biological father of the children.
“While paternity tests are common, the court is not dealing here with it in the ordinary sense.
“Here is a grandmother who wants to extract DNA from her dead son, merely to satisfy her own suspicions.”
The judge concluded that it was not in the best interests of the children to exhume their father’s remains, simply to satisfy the granny.
Pretoria News