Almost two years after two policemen were mistakenly shot and killed by their colleagues on patrol duty, the Police Administration has not paid anything to the families of the deceased.
Consequently, their wives have been struggling to make ends meet and take care of their children.
Mrs. Patience Opoku Tetteh, wife of Lance Corporal Emmanuel Tetteh, 36, for instance has been compelled to move from Winneba to Accra to hustle to fend for herself.
She has sent her two children, aged six and eight years, to her hometown at Nkwanta in the Volta Region, because she was not earning much from petty trading.
The wife of Lance Corporal Francis Appiah, 28, has also travelled with her children to Jasikan in the Volta Region.
In a telephone chat with The Ghanaian Times, Mrs Tetteh said life had become so unbearable after the death of her husband that she had to leave Winneba to Accra to engage in odd jobs, in order to earn a living and learn hair-dressing.
She said she had, for months, been going to the police authorities to ask for her husband’s benefits, but to no avail.
Mrs Tetteh said during one of her visits to the Police Headquarters in Accra, a police lady whose name she did not know, rudely told her to go and look for employment and stop harassing the administration for the payment of her late husband’s benefits.
The Ghanaian Times gathered that the wives of the policemen had persistently been following up on the severance packages of their husbands at the Police Headquarters in Accra, but to no avail.
The investigations showed that during the recent get-together of the West African Security Services Association (WASSA) at the Police Headquarters in Accra, the women were made to sign some documents with the assurance that the entitlements of their late husbands would be paid to them, but nothing had so far been given to them by the Police Administration.
As a result, the women were working through thick and thin to cater for their children as well as their families.
It is recalled that, on Sunday, September 1, 2013, the two policemen stationed at Gomoa Pomadze, near Winneba, were accidentally shot at by a police patrol team which was responding to a distress call for an armed robbery that night.
Initial reports said they were gunned down by robbers, but the Ghana Police Service, in a statement, said the two were inadvertently, shot by the Police patrol team.
The incident occurred after the robbers had gone to rob some students of the Pan African Christian University College (PACUC), at their hostel at Gomoa Pomadze.
The patrol team, in its response to the distress call, had come across a private vehicle driven by a policeman who was at the time conveying his injured colleague to the hospital.
In their judgement, the patrol team took the occupants of the vehicle to be the escaping robbers and, therefore, pursued and fired at them, leading to the death of the two policemen.
When contacted in Accra, the Head of Public Affairs Department of the Ghana Police Service, Superintendent Cephas Arthur, urged the families to contact his outfit for them to be taken to the “appropriate quarters” where their concerns would be addressed.
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