Let me talk to you about commitment.
We live in a country where people make their biggest financial decisions wearing matching outfits and pretending everything will be wonderful.
Unprovoked. You volunteer! Put on that ill-fitting suit, sell six cows and promise to tolerate this person’s morning breath until death do you part.
You walk into Home Affairs, presumably sober and sign a paper telling the State: “We intend to share a bed, split electricity bills, produce children and exchange fake smiles until somebody is carried out in a coffin.”
You just decided life was not complicated enough.
If you want to make that lifelong commitment to someone who has never paid for her own parking ticket, but always needs you as her personal chauffeur, go right ahead. Eat the cake on your wedding day, honeymoon and when you get home. Eat the crumbs off the floor if you have to. One day, that cake will be gone.
Somebody pass me the cake too. I don’t want leftovers!
Three years later, you are back in the same building, begging an officer Dlamini to expunge that certificate as though it were evidence of your financial woes.
According to the Ministry of Home Affairs’ Second Quarter Report for the 2026/2027 financial year, civil servants expunged 201 marriage certificates between July and September.
Two hundred and one.
July was heartbreak season (87). August tried holding it together (50). September gave up (64).
That is a lot of paperwork for an institution whose purpose is to convince people that love is permanent. The ministry has become the country’s administrative undertaker. Except couples come voluntarily, carrying their own death certificates.
The figure is 37 higher than the previous quarter and exceeds that of the corresponding period last year. We are not just breaking up; we are breaking records.
Before anybody organises a national prayer for romance, government included a disclaimer: The figures reflect administrative processing and do not necessarily indicate an increase in divorces.
Oh, thank goodness!
Marriages are not necessarily collapsing faster; the paper-shredder may simply have been fixed. Your soul left the marriage in 2023. The paperwork left in 2026. That is not divorce; that is logistics. Think about the financial suicide of the adventure. A man takes out a four-year personal loan at 18 per cent interest or sells his father’s last cattle, to finance eight hours of happiness for people he does not even like. He buys a velvet cake costing more than his rent, hires a stretch limousine that breaks down at Mtsambama and pays a photographer called SnapShotz_268 to spend five hours arranging his mother-in-law at a 45-degree angle.
Everybody is happy, especially the bank. It has just acquired a marriage that may actually last four years.
Eighteen months later, the cake is gone. Finished. The cattle gone too! There is no cake, no cash and no marriage.
There is just a brother in a rented room at Mvakwelitje, eating cold baked beans out of a tin while his bank deducts E9 400 for a wedding that no longer exists. His former wife has moved on. His loan deduction has not. That loan deduction is more faithful than the marriage ever was. That, my friends, is commitment!
You are not even a tragedy anymore. You are a line item. Page 14, Table 3. Expunged.
Why did some of our parents stay married for 40 miserable years? Not necessarily because they discovered the secret to eternal love. Sometimes, the law made leaving harder than staying.
For decades, people married under civil rites faced restrictive grounds for divorce under Roman-Dutch common law; adultery and desertion.
Two grounds. That was it.
Your spouse could be a nightmare, making you take the long route home for 20 minutes of silence. You could tell a judge: “My Lord, this woman has destroyed my spirit.” And he would reply: “Did she cheat?” People had to fit their circumstances into the law. Some hired private investigators to establish suspected adultery; others dealt with allegations of desertion. You were not married. You were running a private intelligence operation with a joint electricity bill. But the legal position began to change.
An attorney explained the developments, including Resting v Resting in 2017 and the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision in Tesar v Tesar. The latter recognised irretrievable breakdown as a legitimate ground for divorce.
The highest court effectively recognised that a marriage does not need to end with an explosion. Sometimes, it rots. Slowly.
Now, the law recognises circumstances involving emotional, economic, financial and domestic abuse, as well as a fundamental loss of respect.
Loss of respect is a wide umbrella. It can cover a hurricane.
You can walk into the High Court and say: “My Lord, every time I speak, she looks at me like something she stepped on at the bus rank. The respect died in 2022. Shred the paper.”
If your husband puts grocery money on bets while your family is calculating how to buy mealie meal; yet he calculates the odds of a corner kick. It’s done!
If your wife secretly buys land while you pay the EEC bill with airtime, that marriage needs more than counselling. It needs a mortician.
Sometimes, a marriage is simply beyond repair. No amount of anniversary dinners can resurrect something that has been dead for years.
So let us raise a glass to the 201 certificates expunged last quarter. Not because we know 201 marriages collapsed during those three months. The ministry warned us against making that assumption.
But behind every certificate is a story. Somewhere, somebody has admitted the cake is gone, the cows are dead, the photographer has blocked them and the only thing still honouring its vows is the bank.
At least somebody is keeping the vows. Somebody pass me the cake. The hosts are paying. Cake is free!
