At Osu Children’s Home

The Osu Children’s Home, built alongside the Remand Home in the 1950s for orphans and homeless children to be trained to become useful citizens, has become a ‘death transit camp’ where gruesome atrocities are committed against inmates.

The helpless and parentless children have been literally turned into objects of violent physical abuse, emotional torture, corporal punishment and reckless neglect that led to death of three of the orphans just within three months.

Ace investigative journalist Anas Aremeyaw Anas’s working in an undercover operation at the orphanage has been able to capture a video recording of this crime against humanity and has narrated to DAILY GUIDE how death is so rampant at the orphanage that mass burial of the inmates have become the order of the day.

The said video also captured caregivers of the orphanage gleefully sharing among themselves, food stuffs and other items that had been donated to the orphans while some of them packed and set on fire clothes and toys that ought to be shared among the inmates.

“There was a point I had to disguise myself into a woman; I used the name ‘Hajia Barkisu’ and the caregivers of the home sold to me some of the food stuffs that had been donated to them.

“At another time I disguised myself as a pastor called ‘Rev. Abednego Akpabli’ of the Christ of Jah Church; the whole thing took me about seven months to uncover and we used about thirty secret cameras hidden at vantage locations in the home,” Anas told DAILY GUIDE.

The video also showed 6-year-old Yaw Moses, a physically-challenged lad who was reportedly beaten until he had a broken vertebral column and died.

Yaw was in House One, where he and a host of others were being cared for by Florence Adama, Aunty Zenabu, Comfort Anang, Madams Adobea, Grace and Dora.

Madam Grace, according to the children, was supposedly responsible for Yaw until he died. She was sighted in the video clip holding tight the hands of a young boy by name Evans Doudoo, as she ordered other children to slap him.

“Because of his condition, all the caregivers beat him a lot. Aunty Grace beats him anytime she finds anything wrong with him. The last time he fell off his wheelchair and broke his lip, a caregiver, instead of treating him, beat him the more. He was left in the open on the bare floor very often,” a child reported.

Interestingly, while the child was in visible agony, House One record book on his daily condition read that Yaw Owusu was looking healthy, quite cheerful and had a peaceful night.

In the video, he, like other helpless inmates, ate meals from the floor because their ‘mothers’ would not care to lift them up.

When he finally gave up and died with scars all over his body, Yaw was buried at the La Cemetery under the sponsorship of Anas.

House Two is taken care of by one Hajia as house mother, Cecilia Bafo-Bone as her assistant and madams Rachael and Florence as other caregivers, but the situation is not different.

In House Three, the children are in the care of Gladys (house mother), Madam Elizabeth, Edith Kwao-Kuma, Comfort Bekoe, Rose and a woman called Lizzy, while the nursery section is in the care of Edith Awor and Madam Nancy, with Evelyn as cook.

Some of the male overseers who allegedly terrified the children and inflicted pain on some of them include Akuamoah Boateng, 21, who was captured in the video dishing out violent slaps to the children before giving them their daily ration of oranges.

The children also spoke of rampant sodomy, penal weeding, and their food sometimes being maggot-infested.

But in spite of most of the inmates looking malnourished, the supervisor of the home, Sharon Abbey, insisted in the video that all children were adequately taken care of, with each being fed on two eggs a week and the institution using five cartons of chicken per day for their meals.

The daily beatings were not only confined to the home. Those who attend the La Estate Primary School and Osu Home School at South Labadi Estate are caned regularly for non-payment of fees, according to Anas’s findings.

They returned to the home to de-silt gutters while barefooted, as others did their homework seated on the bare floor, unsupervised.

After the investigations in Ghana, Anas travelled to other countries as Senegal, Liberia and the USA to see if what was happening at the Osu Children’s Home is the norm but it turned out to be an exception.
With this revelation, it is not clear what the government, UNICEF, religious leaders and policy think-tanks would do to bring sanity to the home and give the children a better life, as it is expected to do.


Asked what motivated him to investigate happenings at the home, Anas had this to say: “Well we have been doing stories on trafficked children and I commend DAILY GUIDE on this because we have done a couple of collaborative investigations on this subject but this time round I wanted to know what happens to the children we rescue from traffickers and lo and behold this was what I saw. I am tempted to believe that the conditions in the orphanage is worse than what the children would have gone through if we had allowed them to have been trafficked,” Anas explained.


Some scenes in the video showed three babies who died in the last three months under the watch of caregivers, all of whom were buried in a mass grave. After their death, they were lifted up ‘lovelessly’ like unwanted wet kittens which should be gotten rid off as quickly as possible.

The Remand Home has a ‘prison cell’ where children who ‘pilfer’ minor items such as a bottle of Coca Cola are summarily locked up for hours. A child who had diarohea was left to stand for several hours in his own feaces while his colleagues taunted him as ‘nii ni fo’ (he who shits).
A pathetic scene showed babies seated on chamber pots for long hours with no care-giver available to clean them up until they fell asleep on their potty.

Apart from the dead babies, it is now on record that 7-year-old Kobi Stephens, who had a swollen leg, was not attended to for several months and later died on admission at the Ridge Hospital from what hospital sources described as ‘severe internal infection and pneumonia’.

Another inmate, Yayaa Cynthia, 15, also died of unknown causes, but DAILY GUIDE sources say she had complications and went blind in the home before she eventually passed away, while Victor Ataa, 25, also died of an untreated disease.
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