An estate worth R716,070.24 will pass entirely to one heir after the South Gauteng High Court in Johannesburg ruled that a father must be excluded from his late son’s inheritance, despite his remaining the man’s biological parent under the law governing estates left without a will.
The money at stake was considerable for a modest estate. Had distribution followed the default rules under the Intestate Succession Act, the deceased’s surviving parents would each have been entitled to roughly R358,000, the estate being divided equally between them. Instead, Acting Judge Frank Snyckers found that the father’s conduct, a near-total absence from his son’s life across 29 years, warranted a declaration that he was unworthy to benefit under the common-law principle of unworthiness to inherit.
Additional reference context is available at https://iol.co.za/news/crime-and-courts/2026-10-28-father-declared-unworthy-to-inherit-from-late-sons-r716000-estate-after-29-year-absence/.
The application was brought by the deceased’s mother, who served as executrix of the estate after her son died without a will. Her economic interest was clear: preventing his share from flowing to the father. The court heard that the deceased had no spouse, life partner, children, siblings or dependants at the time of his death, narrowing the pool of potential heirs to his two parents under the statutory scheme.
The facts behind the exclusion, as presented in the judgment, chart a consistent pattern of non-payment and disengagement. The parents had a brief relationship when the mother was 18, resulting in the pregnancy. The father made a few payments before the birth, showed little interest, and was not present when the child was born. The couple never lived together. He supplied some nappies in the first month, then largely vanished. When the boy was about a year old, the father visited him in hospital after an injury, an encounter the court treated as effectively the last meaningful involvement of his life.
The maintenance record tells a similar story. The mother initially pursued support through the Maintenance Court, but payments were sporadic. Once she found employment when her son was about a year old, she stopped pursuing maintenance and raised him herself, supported by her mother, brothers and other relatives. A father figure entered the boy’s life at about age six, in the form of his mother’s life partner. Beyond a chance encounter at a function where the two men did not speak, there was no evidence of contact between father and son at any point, and the father contributed nothing to his son’s upkeep for the rest of his life. The son died on July 7, 2021, after contracting Covid-19.
What changed legally is the architecture of the ruling. The mother initially sought a declaration that the father was not a parent for purposes of the Intestate Succession Act, relying on an earlier High Court judgment concerning the inheritance rights of a father who had abandoned a young child. Judge Snyckers declined to follow that interpretation. He held that the meaning of “parent” under the Act could not be adjusted according to conduct or desert, because the legislation was designed to establish clear rules for determining who inherits, rather than requiring courts to judge whether a biological relative deserved the benefit. The Act expressly recognises blood relationships and does not provide that a father who never acquired parental rights under the Children’s Act, or whose rights were terminated, automatically loses his status as a parent for inheritance purposes.
That finding kept the father within the definition of parent, but it did not guarantee his share. The alternative route, a declaration of unworthiness, succeeded, and the judge found that granting it would not prejudice the father, since the factual allegations and reasons for seeking his exclusion were essentially identical to those in the original application.
The judgment also drew its own limits. Judge Snyckers cautioned against reading the ruling as a rule that every absent parent automatically forfeits the right to inherit from a deceased child. The decision, he said, dealt specifically with the complete and sustained abandonment of a child from essentially the beginning of his life. Questions about less extreme cases, including parents who maintained some involvement but fell short in other respects, would have to be addressed in future proceedings.
The mother’s application was dismissed in all other respects, with costs ordered to be paid from the deceased’s estate. The practical effect is that the father cannot inherit despite his legal status as the deceased’s biological parent. The case was reported by IOL.
For estates across the country, the ruling signals that the unworthiness doctrine remains a live instrument for redirecting inheritances where abandonment is complete and sustained. Whether courts will extend it to parents whose involvement fell short without ceasing altogether is a question the next case will have to answer.