Mr. Charles Owusu, an official of the Forestry Commission, has paid a visit to the Kete Krachi Prisons to celebrate the upcoming seventh anniversary of the visit to that prison by Mr. Ken Kuranchie, the Publisher of the Daily Searchlight.
Mr. Owusu also used the occasion to donate thirty bags of rice as well as ten bags of garri and assorted items to the inmates.
Speaking to the Daily Searchlight yesterday, Mr. Owusu said that the visit was in commemoration of the ninth anniversary of Mr. Kuranchie’s incarceration at the prison, which comes up in July.
“I am standing by the bed he slept in when he served time here,” Mr. Owusu said.
In 2013 Mr. Kuranchie was committed to prison for ten days by the Supreme Court of Ghana after he wrote articles raising concerns about some of the rulings by the Supreme Court in the case of the Presidential Election Petitioners at the time. The then Presidential Candidate Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo Addo, his Running Mate Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, and the then National Chairman of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), the late Jake Otanka Obetsebi-Lamptey, had filed a petition in the Supreme Court against the eligibility of the election of Mr. John Dramani Mahama as President of Ghana. This was after Mr. Mahama was declared president in the 2012 General Elections under circumstances that many still believe to be fraudulent.
Mr. Owusu, who was a vibrant and very outspoken opposition activist at the time, swore that he would visit at least one of the three prisons Mr. Kuranchie was taken to every year to honor the sacrifice Mr. Kuranchie made, a vow that he has kept up with religious perseverance for nearly a decade.
Indeed, the Ghana Prisons Service has on several occasions honoured Mr. Owusu for honouuring his vow.
Since he made the promise, Mr. Owusu has also added his birthday the days that he uses to visit various prisons in Ghana to demonstrate love for Ghanaians who are unfortunate enough to find themselves behind prison bars.
The authorities at the Ghana Prisons Service were grateful to Mr. Owusu for the visit and donation. They were highly appreciative about the religious manner in which he has kept up his support to various prisons in Ghana.
They expressed the hope that those who are blessed would continue to extend a helping hand to the various inmates of Ghana’s prisons.
“We need to improve the conditions of people in prisons, because it is not only the guilty who arrive behind these walls, but often the innocent as well. We call on all those who are similarly blessed to remember their brothers and sisters who are our guests,” the authorities said.
(The Daily Searchlight appears every day on the newsstands and for sale 24 hours every day and all week on www.ghananewsstand.com. Visit www.ghananewsstand.com for a wide variety of newspapers published in Ghana and from across the world.)
