Man forced to pay bride price for dead wife

By Godfrey Ojore

A man from Kumi district was forced to pay bride price for his wife who was killed in a boat accident in Katakwi district.

The ill-fated boat was heading to Kumi district when it capsized in the middle of the lake.

Fishermen Saturday morning found the body of Winnie Ikoluot, the last of the five people killed when their boat capsized on Lake Bisina.

The 12-year-old’s body was found floating about seven kilometres away from where the mishap occurred near Mukura in Ngora district.

She was deaf.

“People who were fishing found the body floating as the search team was also combing other parts of the lake,” John Bosco Otwongo, a local diver said.

The recovery of the body concludes a five-day search for the bodies of the five people who drowned after heavy winds tipped over the boat they, together with other seven survivors, were traveling on Tuesday morning.

A few hours following the accident, police confirmed the deaths, supported by eyewitness reports from the survivors, who highly blamed the death of their relatives on the flight of the two boat operators whom they were traveling with on the fateful morning.

Dead, but pay price

In a bizarre turn of events following the ugly incident, a man who lost all his family when the boat capsized was forced to pay bride price for his dead wife.

Sam Okoboi, 32 had to pay the bride price for his fallen wife, the late Harriet Agwang who perished alongside her three children before the bodies were allowed to be buried.

There was a serious standoff between the in-laws and Okoboi’s clan members when the in-laws demanded 10 cows.

After intervention from church leaders, elders and mourners who gathered for the burial, the in-laws accepted sh300,000 and one bull.

But the money and the bull were not considered as dowry but only as ‘transport’.  Okoboi’s in-laws promised to return for the dowry of their daughter that Okoboi had not paid bride price for.

Okoboi and his family were coming from a crusade organized by Living Hope Ministries in Katakwi when they met their fate.

 Police blamed the accident on overloading. Police is still hunting for the boat operators who fled when the disaster struck.

“We have opened a case but we have not preferred charges against them because we are waiting the return of resident state attorney who is to advise us on which charges we should prefer against them,” DPC Gasper Obingu-Onzi told New Vision Saturday morning.