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Trevor Tutu in trouble over child maintenance

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Trevor Tutu. Picture: Lauren Mulligan
Trevor Tutu. Picture: Lauren Mulligan

A bitter child-maintenance fight – scheduled for feedback in South African courts this week – is providing further glimpses into international peacekeeper Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu’s fractured family life.

This week, the retired archbishop’s eldest child, Trevor Tutu (59), is set to hear his fate regarding outstanding maintenance payments for his son, who was born out of wedlock 15 years ago.

The case has been under “special review” at the South Gauteng High Court for nearly two years, with questions raised over an order by the Randburg Magistrates’ Court regarding “validity”, due to a bureaucratic bungle.

After years of legal wrangling, the child’s mother, Auxilia Goromonzi, who lives in Zurich, Switzerland, is demanding her former boyfriend pay up “out of principle”.

In a telephonic interview with City Press this week, she said her son was experiencing “teenage challenges” – which she blamed on him feeling rejected by his absent father.

“I can’t go into details on the particular challenges,” she said. “I think he feels rejected. I mean, he sees his grandparents on television with other children all the time.”

City Press is in possession of a thick stack of documents detailing the maintenance fight, including a 2012 Randburg Magistrates’ Court order for Trevor to pay R4 000 a month towards his son’s upkeep.

But he failed to comply with the maintenance order, triggering a warrant for his arrest, dated January 14 2013. According to police documents, the “accused [Trevor] has absconded on various occasions. It was difficult to trace the accused.”

Invited telephonically on Friday to comment on his failure to pay maintenance for his teenage son, Trevor hung up.

He later sent City Press a text message: “There is no court order. I should leave you to look like an idiot, but to give you a fair chance of avoiding an expensive libel action, I waste my time answering old questions.”

City Press has decided not to name the child and to blur his face in photographs, as requested by Goromonzi, who gave us the pictures.

Earlier this month, Goromonzi’s lawyer, Antonio Ledwaba, met with Randburg Magistrates’ Court senior prosecutor Pieter Erasmus, who promised to finally deliver feedback on the matter by Thursday.

In electronic correspondence forwarded to City Press, Erasmus said the matter was referred to the South Gauteng High Court for a “special review” as questions had been raised over the validity of the court order because the court’s maintenance officer, Delores Groepies, had not been properly sanctioned at the time it was made.

Ledwaba told City Press that he considered the “nonaction” on the case highly unusual.

“This is very unusual; highly unusual. I just find the fact that the matter has been postponed for so long very odd because it’s not in best interest of the child.

“I hope he [Trevor] is not getting special treatment because of who he is.”

City Press approached Erasmus for comment about why the case was taking so long. He said he was busy compiling a “comprehensive report” on the matter, but could not give it to City Press by the newspaper’s print deadline.

The Tutus, one of the country’s most famous and respected families, were in the spotlight last week after the former archbishop’s wife, Leah Tutu, laid criminal charges for malicious damage to property and intimidation against her oldest grandchild, Ziyanda – who is Trevor’s eldest child with his ex-wife, model Zanella Tutu Tshabalala.

This week, Ziyanda (30) a qualified wine maker and renowned Boland socialite, told City Press she was still not on speaking terms with her grandparents after the quarrel that had seen crockery flying at their home in Milnerton.

Contrary to comments Ziyanda made on Twitter last week, she had yet to hand herself over to police.

Meanwhile, Goromonzi claims she did not know Trevor had a wife during their three-month-long relationship, during which he had stayed at her house in Pretoria.

She said she had considered him the love of her life and thought they would get married, only later realising that he had a habit of “exploiting well-off women for their resources”.

“I threw Trevor out because of his womanising and because he just wanted to exploit me financially,” Goromonzi said.

She said the emeritus archbishop and Leah embraced their grandson during a visit when he was two years old – but they stopped replying to her emails soon after that.

City Press is in possession of scathing emails directed at Goromonzi by one of Trevor’s siblings.

“Who in their right mind falls pregnant by a married man, who is not only unemployed at the time, but is also going through the justice system for a variety of infractions of the law? Or did you think that because the man happened to have the surname Tutu, this would make your life easier in South Africa?” it reads.

Trevor has a history of run-ins with the law – including a jail sentence for three and a half years related to a threat in 1989 to detonate a bomb at East London Airport.

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