Solved it by amending the
/etc/ssh/sshd_config
PasswordAuthentication yes
then re-started the service using
sudo systemctl restart sshd
This issue usually occurs when you are trying to ssh outside of the folder you downloaded your .pem files on.
Therefore in order to resolve this you have to make sure that on your terminal,
you first "cd" to the directory where your .pem files are located, then verify their existence there
by using the ls command, if they are there you can then proceed to run the ssh -i XXXX XXXXXXX command.
Hopefully this answers your question.
Thanks.
fixing EC2 instance
For AWS EC2 instance with centos Linux make sure you're using the righr User