A nine-month-old baby girl faced neglect from her parents right from conception to death as her father refused to give her a decent burial. Instead, Osafo Kissi a 36-year-old taxi driver, offered 25,000 cedis bribe to mortuary attendants to bury her together with other unclaimed bodies. The attendants accordingly placed the body of little Vic Kissi among a pile of unidentified bodies for mass burial. But this last act of disrespect for the poor neglected child was not to be as her mother, Miss Gloria Akpabi, and her relatives, intervened and asked Kissi to live up to his parental responsibilities.
Miss Akpabi, 28, said during her 10 months of pregnancy, she never received ante-natal care or post-natal care, thus depriving her of vaccinations against the six childhood-killer diseases.
After Vic was born, Kissi refused to perform the out-dooring ceremony but sent a message to Miss Akpabi a month later that she should name the child Victoria. Little Vic started crawling after nine months but she suddenly fell ill and was admitted for one-and-a-half weeks during which Kissi never visited her and the mother.
When the infant died on September 11, this year, Kissi ignored all appeals to get the baby out of the Tema General Hospital (18 miles east of the capital Accra) morgue for burial. When Miss Akpabi’s relatives contacted him again to know of the burial arrangements, Kissi insisted that he had already buried the child.
He could not, however, tell where the baby was buried because, according to him, he was heavily drunk on that day. Miss Akpabi’s relatives, who became suspicious, found out after two visits to the mortuary that the baby was hidden among a pile of unclaimed bodies ready to be sent for a mass burial.
This compelled Kissi to confess to family members that an attendant at the mortuary charged him 50,000 cedis to get the baby buried. He, however, paid only half the amount for the burial, which, he said, took place on Friday, October 6.
They therefore took Kissi to the mortuary where they showed him the baby among the unclaimed bodies. Kissi could not identify the attendant to whom he paid the money but agreed to pay all the child’s hospital bills totalling about 185,000 cedis and the mortuary fee, which stood at 48,000 cedis by Friday, October 13.
Miss Akpabi’s relatives said their daughters’ mistake was that she moved in to live with Kissi in an uncompleted building without waiting for him to perform the marriage rites. All attempts to get the two to live legally as a couple failed as Kissi failed to show up with any ‘drinks.’
