Anyone who saw OAP and author, Toke Makinwa and her estranged husband, Maje Ayida in court on Wednesday March 14th, 2018 would have assumed they had come together against a common foe.
There was no trace of animosity or anger as they both sat together unlike other couples who would sit and glare at each other.
Not so this ebony and ivory pair.
Watching them sitting together and chatting animatedly as their lawyers slugged it out, no one would believe that it was the same Toke who had accused Maje of sleeping around and infecting her with a sexually transmitted disease.
Justice Folami was hearing the libel case brought by Maje Ayida against Toke Makinwa and Kachifo, publishers of her best selling memoir, On Becoming, in which she had alleged that he infected her with said STD.
Their bonhomie was so infectious that the trial judge had to call their on lawyers and suggest an out of court settlement directing them to go to the Lagos State Multi-Door Center.
Toke’s lawyer was all for it but not Maje’s lawyer who raised issues of procedure.
It will be recalled that their marriage, which was contracted in 2014 was dissolved on October 6, 2017 at an Igbosere high court presided over by Justice Morenike Obadina.
In her ruling dissolving the marriage on the grounds of adultery and cruelty, the judge ruled that – “I hold that the marriage has broken down on grounds of intolerable behavior. I hereby pronounce a ‘Decree Nisi’ dissolving the marriage between Makinwa and Ayida which was administered at the Federal Marriage Registry, Ikoyi, Lagos, on Jan. 15, 2014. The ‘Order Nisi’ shall become absolute three months from today unless within that period sufficient cause is shown why it should not be made absolute.”