BBC Africa has exposed the inhumane treatment the elderly at a church-based home are subjected to, revealing the state of elderly facilities in the country.
According to journalists who posed as employees for two weeks, the staff at the facility were often beating the elderly who disobeyed the orders.
The facility, Presbyterian Church of East Africa (PCEA) Thogoto Care Home for the Aged, hosts around 50 elderly men and women, according to BBC.
One of the staff, revealed that they cane the elderly to calm them down adding that some of them were violent when left alone.
Some of the staff were also reported to dump food on the table for those who could not feed themselves with spoons.
In such cases, some of the victims went days without food and some even starved to death.
However, according to the staff, it was common for some to die of starvation since no one was willing to feed them.
“Many have died of hunger here. The caregivers deny them lunch, deny them dinner, all because they do not want to make time to come and feed them,” one of the staff told BBC.
The staff also revealed that a huge chunk of the food donated to the facility was stolen by senior staff members.
“There was food there but most of the food was stolen. They overload the car with food. They overload the car with so much food it tilts,” a former caregiver told BBC.
Besides being denied food, some of the victims were denied medical care for months mostly due to negligence and lack of funding.
An elderly man complained of severe pain due to his serious skin problem. His complaints however fell on deaf ears as the staff watched him suffer.
The journalists also discovered that all new staff who joined the facility sooner or later started to mistreat the elderly as it had become a norm.
According to the 2019 census, the elderly population above 65 years was recorded at 1,870,493 persons accounting for a mere 3.9 per cent of the total population.
This was an increase of 538,220 from 2009 when they were recorded at 1,332,273.
