Her Space with Bridget Mensah:  Joana Quaye was listed as co-founder of her ex-husband’s company

…He went on television and said she contributed nothing

The divorce case of Joana Quaye and businessman Richard Nii Armah Quaye, widely known as RNAQ, took a fresh and deeply contentious turn when the microfinance mogul sat down with media personality Deloris Frimpong Manso on The Delay Show on 25 April 2026 and told the nation, in plain language, that his former wife played no meaningful role in making him rich.

It was a bold claim. It was also, according to court records and his ex-wife’s legal team, a demonstrably false one.

RNAQ told Delay that he was a wealthy man before marrying his ex-wife and that he had funded their luxurious wedding entirely on his own. He said: “So, if I had never had money, I couldn’t have married her because we had a luxurious wedding. I had money before I got married to her, so I spent a lot of money marrying her. Before I married her, I had bought a car, a VW Passat. I had a car before I got married, and that was what we used for our wedding.” The VW Passat, offered as proof of pre-marital prosperity, quickly became the most ridiculed detail in a week already full of them.

His ex-wife’s lawyers responded swiftly. In a statement signed by former Attorney General Godfred Dame and Dame and Partners, they said it was a matter of public record, documented in court proceedings dated 13 March 2024, that RNAQ returned from a short stay in the United Kingdom in 2009 unemployed and that he had none of the properties he currently owns at the time of the marriage in 2010. The statement further confirmed that both Joana and Richard established Quick Credit and Investment Micro-Credit Company Limited jointly in 2011, with both listed as original shareholders, and that RNAQ subsequently and secretly transferred Joana’s shares out of her name without her knowledge or consent. Dame and Partners described the interview as a public relations stunt intended to pollute the minds of the public and warned that it may have breached legal protocols given the ongoing appeal.

The interview landed like a fist. According to a woman claiming to be Joana’s cousin, who spoke to TikTok personality Trouble Carlos, Joana broke down in tears after watching the broadcast and had to be taken away from her home so that her mother would not see her daughter in that condition and fall ill. “She was crying and shivering. The pain she went through this morning we made a mistake by making her watch the interview,” the cousin said. “We had to go and take her from the house so that her mother won’t see her daughter in that condition and fall sick. It is not easy.”

This is the world RNAQ has brought his former wife into. A world where she watches television and hears a man she spent sixteen years beside tell millions of Ghanaians she was never really there.

The Delay Show appearance did not occur in a vacuum. It came three months after one of the most controversial divorce rulings in recent Ghanaian legal history. There is a particular kind of humiliation that arrives dressed in legal language. It does not shout. It speaks from a high bench, in measured tones, and tells a woman that the sixteen years she poured into a man, his children, his company, and his ambitions were not worth very much. That the correct valuation, after careful consideration, is GHS 300,000, one third of a house in Dansoman, two cars, and GHS5,000 a month for three children. And one parting observation from the court, that she is still physically attractive and perfectly capable of finding another man.

The divorce formally concluded on 20 January 2026, when Justice Justin Kofi Dorgu delivered his ruling at an Accra Family Court. Joana had sought a financial settlement of GHS 50 million, approximately $4.5 million, alongside other reliefs. The judge dismissed the figure entirely, describing it as lacking evidentiary support. RNAQ, meanwhile, retained the Trassacco Estate property acquired during the marriage, a Bugatti Chiron, a private jet, and the entire corporate architecture of Bills Micro Credit Limited. He has often been publicly linked to socialite Hajia4Real, who is believed to be staying in that same Trassacco Estate home. The woman who helped create the wealth that purchased the estate has been allocated a fraction of a different, lesser house. The contrast is not subtle. It is not uncomfortable. It is simply grotesque.

Justice Dorgu offered a philosophical observation to accompany the ruling. He stated: “Marriage is not an investment, and no ordinary investment would yield such a return over 10 or 20 years.” The sentence has since circulated across Ghana’s social media with the velocity of a national anthem, shared approvingly by men as the definitive verdict on what women are owed when marriages end. What those men appear not to have noticed is that nobody was accusing Joana Quaye of treating her marriage as an investment. She was treating it as a life.

The judge went further. He stated that the reduced award was intended partly to discourage divorces motivated by expectations of large financial gains. Read that again slowly. He used his ruling not merely to adjudicate between two specific parties, but to send a message to all women considering leaving a marriage. The courtroom became a pulpit. The judgment became a policy. And the policy was: do not leave, or if you do, leave quietly, without asking for too much.

He also stated, from the bench, that Joana Quaye is physically very much attractive and capable of remarrying at any time she felt like it. In a courtroom of the Republic of Ghana in the year 2026, a sitting judge appended to a woman’s financial settlement a note about her marketability to future husbands. Her body, her face, her presumed desirability, these became financial instruments in a court of law. Deputy Chief of Staff Nana Oye Bampoe Addo publicly questioned what physical attractiveness and the capability of remarrying have to do with adjudicating the dissolution of a marriage. She is right. The legal answer is nothing. The cultural answer, in a society that still measures a woman’s worth largely by her proximity to a man, is unfortunately something else entirely.

None of this can be fully understood without looking at the numbers that surround it. The 2020 Ghana Time Use Survey by the Ghana Statistical Service found that women in Ghana spend an average of 6.4 hours daily on unpaid care and domestic work, compared to 1.7 hours spent by men. Across sub-Saharan Africa, women and girls perform as much as three times more unpaid care work than men and boys. The International Labour Organisation estimates that globally, 16.4 billion hours of unpaid care work are performed every day, equivalent to approximately $11 trillion or 9% of global GDP. Women account for $8 trillion of that figure. In sub-Saharan Africa, 74% of this unpaid care work is carried out by women.

When Joana Quaye was co-founding a microfinance company, she was presumably also keeping a home. When she was raising three children, she was freeing him to become the brand, the personality, the man on the jet. While he was becoming the kind of man who owns a Bugatti Chiron, throws a 40th birthday party featuring Davido, Stonebwoy and Diamond Platinumz, and gifts strangers vehicles in public, she was there at the starting line. The company was the engine. She helped build the engine. Now the car is magnificent and gleaming, and she has been offered one third of the garage in Dansoman.

When a woman spends sixteen years cooking, cleaning, managing a household, raising children, and sitting as a co-founder of her husband’s company, she is not merely being a good wife. She is performing trillions of cedis worth of unremunerated economic activity. She is the infrastructure on which his wealth was built. Justice Dorgu looked at all of that and saw a woman asking for too much.

Ghana’s courts have not always been so inclined. The 1959 case of Quartey v Martey reflected the customary law position of its era, that property acquired during marriage, even with a wife’s support, belonged to the husband. That position shifted gradually. In Yeboah v Yeboah, courts began recognising non-financial contributions such as supervising construction as grounds for awarding female spouses a meaningful share of marital property. The shift gained its clearest expression in Gladys Mensah v Stephen Mensah, where the Supreme Court embraced the principle that equality is equity, holding that a wife’s domestic role alone could justify an equal division of marital assets. The arc was bending. The Quaye ruling bends it back.

The Supreme Court, in Anyetei v Anyetei, held that relief in divorce proceedings must be grounded in matrimonial contributions, conduct during the marriage, and the reasons for its breakdown, and described the use of personal opinions about a wife’s physical appearance as unfortunate. Justice Dorgu’s reasoning, measured against that precedent, stands on deeply unstable legal ground. Her lawyers filed a notice of appeal on 1 April 2026, describing the ruling as a raw deal that is manifestly inadequate, inequitable and unfair. Former Attorney General Godfred Yeboah Dame is leading the challenge. The legal team argues that the trial judge failed to properly recognise assets acquired during the marriage as joint marital property, and that the court did not adequately assess Joana’s direct and indirect contributions, domestic, financial, and supervisory, to the acquisition and growth of the couple’s assets.

The fallout from the Delay Show interview has deepened suspicions in some quarters that RNAQ is using his wealth and influence to control media access and shape public perception around the divorce. Joana’s cousin alleged that arrangements had been made for her to speak with prominent media personalities, but that those engagements collapsed at the final stages. She further claimed that after the RNAQ interview aired, attempts to reach Delay were unsuccessful and the group was blocked on all communication platforms. RNAQ has not addressed those specific claims publicly.

Ghanaian comedienne Afia Schwarzenegger, meanwhile, shared footage of the home in Dansoman where Joana and her three children currently reside, pointing to the contrast between its surroundings and the standard of the Trassacco Estate life RNAQ continues to enjoy. A man who gifts strangers vehicles while his children’s mother receives GHS5,000 a month has apparently not troubled the popular imagination very much. Generosity, in this country’s cultural imagination, often flows outward from men, in public, in front of cameras. What it costs the women at home is considered a private matter.

The public reaction divided along familiar lines. One social media user wrote: “I pity those women out there being housewives and not planning to work hard. No contribution, no chop.” The irony of applying that sentiment to a woman who was literally listed as a co-founder and director of her husband’s company appears to have been entirely lost. Women, meanwhile, received the ruling as a survival briefing. A female Ghanaian lawyer on TikTok called on women to ensure their partners sign prenuptial agreements regarding joint property. Another urged women to ensure their full names appear on all property documents and to be actively involved in the purchase and construction process. The advice is practical. It is also a quiet tragedy. What it describes is a world in which women must enter their most intimate human relationships in full defensive formation, signing documents, preserving evidence, anticipating betrayal, because the alternative is to trust a system that has just demonstrated, again, that it does not regard them as full economic partners in their own lives.

This is the deeper violence of a ruling like this. On one level, it punishes Joana Quaye specifically. On another, it disciplines all women generally, telling them that ambition in divorce court will be treated as greed, that contributions invisible to the eye will remain invisible to the law, that their bodies are still tradeable currency in a judicial calculation. On the deepest level of all, it reaffirms a social contract that Ghana has never been fully honest about: that a woman’s labour inside a marriage is expected, obligatory, and therefore valueless. It is not a contribution. It is a duty. And you do not get paid for doing your duty.

Ghana ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women in 1986. The ECOWAS Supplementary Act on Gender Equality specifically urges member states to promote the inclusion of women’s unpaid work in national accounts. Ghana signed all of this. Ghana committed to all of this. And then a judge in Accra told a woman who spent sixteen years building a man’s empire that marriage is not an investment. One week later, that same man sat across from a television host and told the country she was never really there to begin with.

The Court of Appeal now holds the question. What is a wife’s labour worth? What is sixteen years worth? What is the co-founder of a man’s fortune entitled to when that fortune is divided? Ghana is watching. And this time, it cannot pretend it did not hear the question.

Bridget Mensah believes the right story, told well, can change everything. A communications strategist and gender equality advocate with 10+ years in Ghana’s media industry, she uses words as tools for accountability and amplification particularly for women. She leads communications for the Network of Women in Broadcasting (NOWIB), She is the Head of Corporate Affairs at Ghana Digital Centres

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