'I slept in a cell with 70 people' - Kwaw kese shares harrowing prison experience
Hip-Life musician, Kwaw kese, has thrown light on his experience at the Kumasi Central Prison, where he was remanded for allegedly possessing narcotics.
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The award-winning artiste shared his experience Tuesday on Accra-based Joy FM's 'Super Morning Show'.
Read Kwaw Kesse's account below:
"I slept in a cell with about 70 people. This was like a normal single room .
There were only 3 beds which were reserved for the cell leaders. We lie on the floor, packed like yam. They will ask if you want to sleep the yam sleeping or the monkey sleeping.
With the yam sleeping, they are packed like sardines. The monkey sleeping, you sleep with your legs on your chest.
People have done that for so many years and they are just there, on remand. The toilet is in the centre of the room. It showed me something-the people are so clean; the room didn't smell.
In the night, people ease themselves and at 6 am in the morning, the toilet is opened. Imagine about 800 people in the remand prison using only 4 toilet facilities.
It is full to the brim and faeces fall on the floor. Someone pounds it like fufu. This is the same place that people sit to cook and bath. It’s crazy. It was there that I realized that I am in a different planet; the way human beings are being treated.
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There is this banku that is dropped in the sun and if you like it, you go for it. you see that the people who go for this food are hopeless.
The soup will come in the next 3 or 4 hours. I don’t know why it’s this way. If you are being paid Ghc 1.40 a day, what do you do with that? Not all of them come out and get the chance to come on radio and tell their story.
This is inhumane. I spoke to someone who was 70. He said he was going from the farm and saw police chasing some people like they were smoking and the police ambushed them. He doesn't know his offence. He has been there for 3 months.
Some people have been there for 3-4 years because they don’t have anyone to take them to court. The prisons are like a hospital.
Anybody can end up there. If it’s meant for us, we should feel a bit comfortable when we are there. Ibrahim Adam and former president Kufuor have been there before.
Not everybody in prison is a bad person or a criminal. It’s a correctional facility, not a dungeon. If it turns into a dungeon, it may come back to haunt us.
I want to share love with the prisoners on Valentine's Day and put smiles on their faces. I want everybody to come on board.
They need us. People should think about this and try to support and make the prisoners happy people. To the youth in Ghana, I would like to say, focus on whatever field they are in. do whatever you can to stay out of prison."