DSP Gifty Mawuenyaga Tehoda, the police officer who spent 45 days in BNI cells has recounted her children bore tremendous indignity and ridicule whilst she was in detention.
According to DSP Tehoda, her children, apart from being called names, were severely traumatised.
She was arrested, prosecuted and acquitted over cocaine-exhibit-turned-baking-soda case that rocked the country in 2011.
Mrs Tehoda said she walked into the offices of the Bureau of National Investigations (BNI) to answer questions in relation to cocaine exhibit turning into baking and unbeknownst to her, she was going to begin the journey of a long detention and an equally long drawn out legal battle.
DSP Tehoda, who was Deputy Head of the Police Commercial Crimes Unit, was subsequently sacked from the Police Service on August 28, 2012.
After five years legal battle, the Human Rights Division of the High Court Friday, March 31, 2017, ordered the Ghana Police Service to reinstate her.
It further ordered that she should be given her full salary for the five years that she was on interdiction, all promotions due her, as well as damages of 23,000 cedis.
Recounting how the incident affected her family, DSP Tehoda told Joy FM’s Super Morning Show sit-in host, Nhyira Addo, it was a nightmare she would never wish for her enemy.
“It was not easy for me but it was only God that sustained me for all these traumatising periods and by the grace of God I was able to come out of it after those terrible days of detention,” said.
Her daughter was in Class six and family members had to lie to her that her mother had travelled outside the country. “I was also crying in the cells,” Mrs Tehoda recounted.
She added that her son, who was then in Senior High School, was called “Tagor” (a notorious drug dealer, according to police) and “even though he kept complaining, he was coping.”
But her Class six daughter, who was 12, “will come home, ‘mummy this is how my colleagues have been calling me, they call me ‘Coke Girl’”.
From news bulletins, the girl’s schoolmates identified her as Mrs Tehoda’s daughter “so when they want to refer to her, they say ‘Coke Girl come here…’ so the whole day she will be sad,” she narrated.
Nonetheless, she said the girl pulled through and “now she is in SHS”.
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