Nigerian pastor and counsellor Dr. Olumide Emmanuel has warned couples about the dangers of financial secrecy in marriage, insisting that transparency and teamwork are essential.
“There must never be any money that your spouse has that you’re not aware of,” he said on Your View show on TVC monitored by MyNewsGh.
“Everything you have, I should be aware of. Everything I have, you should be aware of.”
Speaking on the risks of financial secrecy, he revealed how hidden investments and properties often go unclaimed when one spouse passes away.
“I’m into business, and I can tell you for free, there are lots of people that have properties with us, that had investments with us in the days when we used to do investment, and they died. Their property and everything is gone,” he said.
Dr. Emmanuel also pointed out the massive amount of unclaimed money sitting in financial institutions due to secrecy in marriages.
“Do you know how much money is locked up in Nigerian banking systems? How many accounts, how much money Nigerian banks have that nobody is coming to collect?
“How much money is locked up in shares in different finance houses, in different stockbroking firms, just because somebody was hiding something?”
He stressed that for a marriage to succeed financially, there must be unity in money matters. “There should be joint knowledge, joint planning, and joint decision-making,” he said.
“When I met you, I proposed to you. I sat down, you accepted, and we planned the wedding. Why can’t we plan our finances? How do we want to run this home?”
He further explained that making financial decisions together helps couples avoid blame when things go wrong. “Every decision you make will not always turn out right, so that when anything goes wrong, we now know that, ‘Ah, we agreed together.’”
