HONOUR your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you”.

This Biblical advice seems to have no meaning for a 43-year-old man from Bulawayo, who is in the habit of harassing his mother as punishment for inviting her alleged boyfriend to stay at the family house, three months after the death of his father.

So upset is Edrian Chiweshe that he wanted his mother Chiedza Chiweshe to move out of the family house in Montrose suburb.

Fearing that her son would live true to his threats of rendering her homeless, Edrian’s mother rushed to the Bulawayo Civil Court and sought a protection order against him.

In her application she demanded that her son should stop harassing her and interfering with her personal life.

“I am the applicant in this matter and the respondent is my son.

We stay at the same place.

I am applying for a protection order against him.

He is disturbing my peace.

Whenever he is drunk, he verbally abuses me and threatening me saying I should move out of the house because it belongs to his late father.

“He shouts at me saying I once stayed with a boyfriend at the house which he does not like.

May the honourable court grant me a protection order so that my son stops verbally, emotionally abusing me and threatening me and also not to interfere with my personal life since I am his mother,” she begged.

She said her son wanted her to go and stay with her sister in Mutare.

In response Edrian accused his mother of being insincere saying she moved on a few months after the death of his father.

“I am opposed to her accusations that I shout at her when I am drunk.

She is the one who provokes me and starts shouting at me.

When my father passed away within three months, she had another man whom she started staying with at the house and this is a period in which she was supposed to be mourning.

“I was working in South Africa and when I came back to renew my passport my siblings restrained me from going to the house as they feared that the situation would not go down well with me.

I agree that at times I shout at her but she will be the one who would have started shouting at me,” responded Edrian.

His mother, however, disputed his accusations.

“He is lying and he does not want to work.

Just imagine he is 43 years old and I am the one who is buying him food.

He drinks alcohol from morning and when he is drunk, he starts shouting at me.

What he wants is just to insult me.

I don’t dispute that I had a boyfriend but it’s not true that I started dating him soon after the death of his father and again it’s not true that I was staying with him at the house since he had his own house,” she said.

In her ruling the presiding magistrate Nomasiko Ndlovu ordered Edrian not to verbally and emotionally abuse his mother or threaten her in any way.