By Johannes Jafo Akunatu 
The Gonja Kingdom marked a defining moment in its long relationship with education as the Yagbonwura, Bii-Kunuto Jewu Soale I, commissioned a newly rebuilt Guidance and Counselling unit of Damongo Senior High School. The King attended as Guest of Honour alongside the Savannah Regional Minister and the headmaster of the school, handing over a facility that had sat in disrepair for decades before the Bii-Kunuto Educational Fund stepped in to restore it.
In his welcome address, the Headmaster, Mr. Di-Yakah Ibrahim Salifu, called the commissioning a memorable milestone in the school’s history. He told the gathering that the centre represents something larger than four walls and a fresh coat of paint. It signals a deliberate choice to put students’ emotional wellbeing, mental health and personal growth on equal footing with academic results.
“We are not merely commissioning a building, but celebrating a vision that places the welfare and holistic development of our students at the centre of education,” he said.
Mr. Salifu expressed gratitude to the Yagbonwura and the Bii-Kunuto Educational Fund for a contribution he described as generous and timely. Students dealing with peer pressure, mental health challenges and uncertainty about their future, he said, now have a dedicated space and the right support to help them through it.
For students who walked past the old structure every day without ever using it, the handover carries weight beyond just a ceremony. A form two student, Issahaku Salifa speaking with Bridge news described the counselling unit as the missing piece in a school that had everything except a proper place to talk. She said students often carried personal struggles silently because there was nowhere private to sit down with a counsellor and work through them. Now, she said, that silence has a room to break in. Her coulleage, Jebuni Adamu put it in blunter terms. He said academic pressure alone can crush a teenager, and without guidance, many students internalize failure instead of learning from it. He credited the King directly, saying royal attention to a guidance centre sends a message that character formation matters as much as grades.
Why guidance and counselling shapes more than report cards
Guidance and counselling departments exist to do work that classrooms cannot always reach. Teachers instruct. Counsellors listen, diagnose and redirect. Research from educational psychology consistently links structured school counselling to lower dropout rates, reduced disciplinary incidents and stronger academic performance among adolescents navigating puberty, peer pressure and family instability at the same time.
In a school like Damongo SHS, drawing students from farming communities, market towns and households under real economic strain, the stakes multiply. A teacher in the school, Mr. Eliasu Hambil explained that many students arrive carrying burdens that have nothing to do with textbooks: family conflict, financial hardship, grief, or the quiet anxiety of being the first in their family to reach senior high school. Without a counsellor trained to spot those signs early, He said, a bright student can slip through the cracks and nobody notices until it is too late. Character formation too, depends on deliberate guidance rather than accident. Students absorb values from the adults who take time with them, not merely from rules posted on a noticeboard. A functioning counselling unit gives the school a structured way to teach discipline, respect and decision-making skills that stay with a student long after graduation. One resident, a retired teacher for over three decades, said he watched generations of students drift into poor choices simply because no one sat them down early enough. He called the new facility overdue and said its impact will show up in the community’s crime and dropout statistics within a few years.
Hope, confidence, healing”: inside the Bii-Kunuto Educational Fund
Speaking on behalf of the Yagbonwura, the coordinator of the Bii-Kunuto Educational Fund welcomed the gathering and laid out what the centre means in plain terms. He said the facility stands for hope, confidence and healing, three things a school cannot function without.
He walked the crowd through the Fund’s record since its founding in 2023. Built on the belief that no child should lose an education to financial hardship, the Fund has sponsored close to 60 brilliant but needy students into tertiary institutions across Ghana and abroad, including placements in the People’s Republic of China, at a total cost of 300,000 Ghana cedis. Three of those beneficiaries are currently pursuing medical studies in China, training that will eventually return to serve communities across Gonjaland and beyond.
He offered a line that drew visible nods from the audience: leadership is not measured in certificates but in vision, commitment and humility. The Fund, he said, remains committed to child education across the kingdom and sees the counselling centre as a natural extension of that mission, pairing academic support with the emotional and psychological guidance students need to actually use it.
He singled out Hon. Iddrisu Mohammed, special aide to the Yagbonwura, for particular thanks, crediting his sleepless nights and steady coordination with helping bring the project from idea to ribbon cutting.
To learn is to listen”: the Regional Minister’s charge
The Savannah Regional Minister, Lawyer Salisu Be-Awuribe, commended the Yagbonwura for the initiative and framed the entire project around a single idea: listening sits at the heart of both leadership and education.
“To learn is to listen,” he said, drawing a line to the King’s name, Bii-Kunuto and to the spirit behind the project itself. He urged continued investment in counselling services across the region’s schools and offered a reminder that landed with quiet force: even counsellors need guidance of their own support systems, training and renewal to keep doing work that asks so much of them.
A King who builds instead of waits
What distinguishes this project from routine philanthropy is who funded it. The Bii-Kunuto Educational Fund has quietly become one of the most consistent sources of support for brilliant but financially struggling students across the Savannah Region. Rather than issuing statements urging government to act, the King has chosen to build, fund and hand over tangible infrastructure.
That distinction matters in a country where traditional authorities often occupy ceremonial space while national government carries the full weight of development. Ghana’s chieftaincy institution predates the modern state and still commands land, loyalty and moral authority in ways elected officials frequently cannot match. When a paramount chief redirects that authority toward classrooms and counselling rooms instead of waiting on a ministry, the effect ripples beyond one school compound.
Residents interviewed for this feature repeatedly drew a line between the Yagbonwura’s domestic development record and his diplomatic outreach beyond Gonjaland. He became the first king from the northern territories to pay a formal courtesy call on his counterparts in Dagbon and Mamprugu, breaking a long-standing pattern of parallel kingdoms operating with minimal direct engagement. He followed that with a historic visit to the Asantehene at Manhyia Palace, a gesture residents described as placing Gonjaland firmly on the map of serious inter-kingdom diplomacy. A Food vendo at the event Madam Sadia Adam said the King’s travels have done for Gonja’s reputation what decades of government press releases never managed. She said people in Kumasi and Tamale now speak of Damongo differently because their King showed up in person, extended respect and built relationships that outlast any single administration. Another resident, a civil servant with the Municipal Assembly, Mr. Mashud Saeed said the Manhyia visit alone opened conversations about collaboration on trade and cultural exchange that Gonjaland had not seriously pursued in his lifetime.
The case for traditional authorities carrying their share
Ghana’s development conversation tends to orbit around central government, as if every school, clinic and road must wait for a ministry’s budget line. That habit has cost the country decades of stalled projects and communities left waiting on promises that never mature past a sod-cutting ceremony. Traditional authorities sit on land, mobilize labour and command trust that no district assembly can replicate on short notice. When they choose to build rather than lobby, projects move at a pace bureaucracy rarely achieves.
The Bii-Kunuto Educational Fund demonstrates what that looks like in practice. Instead of a foundation that exists on paper, it has become a functioning pipeline connecting royal resources to the exact gap central government has left unfilled: support for gifted students without means, and now, a properly staffed space for their emotional and moral development. Other paramount chiefs across the country would do well to study the model rather than treat chieftaincy as a purely ceremonial office confined to durbars and funerals.
A youth leader in Damongo and former Assemblyman for Kumbo Electral area in the North Gonja District, Hon. Mohammed Yakubu argued that traditional authorities carry a moral debt to their people that predates the modern constitution. He said the land, the loyalty and the cultural capital chiefs inherit come from the same communities now waiting on schools and clinics, and that inheritance carries an obligation to reinvest. He praised the Yagbonwura for treating that obligation as active duty rather than symbolic status.
A project the whole school will feel
For Damongo SHS, the commissioning closes a long chapter of institutional neglect. Staff say the previous facility had become effectively unusable, forcing counsellors to hold sensitive conversations in shared offices or empty classrooms, an arrangement that discouraged students from opening up in the first place. Confidentiality, the backbone of any counselling relationship, simply did not exist under those conditions.
The rebuilt unit changes that calculus immediately. Students now have a dedicated, private space to process the pressures of adolescence, exam stress and the transition toward adulthood, with trained staff equipped to guide rather than merely discipline. Teachers expect the ripple effects to show first in attendance and behavioural referrals, then gradually in academic outcomes as students better equipped to manage stress perform closer to their actual potential. As the King cuts the ribbon on a building meant to shape young minds long after this ceremony fades from memory, the message to other traditional authorities across Ghana is direct. Development does not require permission from Accra. It requires will, resources already within reach, and leaders prepared to act rather than wait.
Charles Prempeh PhD 
Ishmael Junourgh