SHANNISE DZOBO
MASVINGO CITY- The office of the Master of the High Court which is conducting awareness campaigns in Masvingo has urged people to write inheritance wills before they die to avoid unnecessary family disputes The Midweek Watch can reveal.
The campaign is running under the theme “demystifying inheritance issues”.
This was said by the Deputy Master of the High Court, Kumbirai Chigomararwa in Masvingo City before she headed to Gutu Mpandawana for the same campaign.
“We are conducting an awareness campaign across the country on what our office does and stand for because most people tend to know the functions of the Master of High Court after the death of loved ones and having family disputes in distribution of the estate,” said Chigomararwa.
“People should know about our functions so that we avoid mental health issues, drug and substance abuse and having family disputes caused by the wrong way of handling family disputes and how they distribute their estates after the death of a family member,”
She also stated that the other reason that prompted the campaign is that there was a surge of family disputes all over due to the distribution of the estates countrywide.
“What prompted the campaign is a surge in family disputes all over the country that are later brought to the Master of the High Court. This process takes long hence we saw the need to curb the rise of family disputes in our country”.
“Since we started the campaign in July this year there has been a decrease of family disputes as compared to the period before the campaign seeing a 40 percent decrease and 70 percent increase of people registering their estates and a lot of movement of records from different places because they have grasped the information that has been disseminated to them”.
Chigomararwa went on to reiterate that it is of paramount importance to register inheritance wills with the Master of the High Court for a fee of US$25 so that one secures the life of those who are left behind after they are gone and also for those that would have lost a family member, they should register the estate of the deceased in a matter of 14 days so that it makes it easier to facilitate the distribution of the estate in a short space of time.
The office of Master of the High Court is headed by Master Eldard Mutasa and it has over 100 officers deployed in six different provinces.
The Master’s office which is still in the process of decentralising is represented in Harare, Mutare, Bulawayo, Chinhoyi, Gweru and Masvingo.
The office of the Master of the High Court, which handles inheritance cases is now a department in the Ministry of Justice, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs after the government approved the transfer of the office from the employ of the Judicial Service Commission in 2021.
