702, Wednesday evening

Starts like this: the South Houting High Court in Johannesburg has declared a father unworthy to inherit from his late son's estate worth more than seven hundred and sixteen thousand Rand after finding that he had been virtually absent from the young man's life for twenty-nine years. And the second paragraph makes this point: the court ruled that the father's complete abandonment of his son from infancy until his death at the age of 29.

Justified disqualifying him from inheriting under the common law principle of unworthiness to inherit. There's so much stuff there that I must admit I didn't know anything about. So let's get into it with somebody who does. Minentle Kumalo is a legal practitioner and joins us now on 702 Drive. Ms. Kumalo, welcome and thanks very much for your time. I've never read about this before, but that makes me wonder if, you know, assume that it's not common.

And when perhaps it might be. Is this the kind of thing that presiding officers, judicial officers do on a regular basis? Good afternoon to you. Afternoon, John. How are you? Yes, well, thanks to you. I'm good, thank you. It doesn't happen often. It's very, very rare that we see such cases, but it is not unprecedented like we see with this one before, because there has been a previous

Case where a parent was deemed to be unworthy to inherit from a deceased estate who, where the deceased passed interstate, that means that the deceased had no will, like in this case, where the gentleman died in 2021 without a will. Right. So, yeah, no, no, it's interesting. And now, maybe just to continue painting the picture so everyone has an idea.

Now, the young man's mother was still alive, and she actually went to the court and said, Look, you know, ordinarily, this would be an equal split between myself and the boy's father, but I'm advancing reasons why, in fact, the father shouldn't get anything. Is that a precondition of a decision like this that somebody has to object? No, like I said, it's not very common. So, in this case,

The mother was actually trying to get the court to rule the father as a non-parent. Right. And so when you die interstate, which means that you die without a will, ordinarily it goes to your spouse. Or if you don't have a spouse and you have children, it goes to your children. But when you don't have both, it then goes to your parents. Like you had stated, the father would have then gotten half of the estate and the mother gets the other half. So now, in this situation, the mother approached the high court to have the