“I had no childhood dreams” — Adutwum reflects
He did not grow up wanting to be anything in particular. Not a doctor, not a politician, not a minister. In the village of Jachie, there was simply no frame of reference for such ambitions.
That is how former Education Minister and Bosomtwe Member of Parliament Yaw Osei Adutwum describes his childhood, not with bitterness, but with a clarity that makes his eventual trajectory all the more striking.
“The interesting thing is that in the villages, we didn’t have that much of a dream. The only time I met a doctor was when I went to the hospital. There was no doctor from my town. When I was growing up, there was no medical doctor that I knew. I was not aspiring. I didn’t have that. When I look back, there was nothing about what I wanted to be,” he said during an appearance on The Career Trail, broadcast on Joy Learning TV and JoyNews.
What he had instead was a father, one who showed up.
The elder Adutwum was a travelling man, sometimes gone for over a year at a stretch, working away from home. But whenever he returned to Jachie, he had a ritual. He would seek permission from the local headteacher and walk through every classroom, speaking to the children about the value of education, holding up his own life, and the opportunities he never had, as the lesson itself.
“Whenever he came to Jachie, he would get permission from the head teacher and go around all the classrooms advising the children to study, using his life as an example that he didn’t get the opportunity for education. So if they had it, they should study hard,” Dr Adutwum recalled.
One visit changed everything, though the young Adutwum did not quite know it at the time. His father returned home one day carrying news from the headteacher: his son was, in the teacher’s words, exceptionally bright. University, the headteacher had apparently suggested, was a real possibility. The father, unfamiliar with what university even meant, translated it the only way he knew how.
“My dad came home and said he had spoken with my head teacher and was told I was super bright. At the time, my head teacher mentioned something like university, but my father didn’t really understand what that meant. So he came and told me, ‘You are bright; you will go to the last school.'”
The phrase lodged itself somewhere deep.
“My father telling me I was bright and that I would go to the last school is something that stayed with me and I never forgot. I didn’t even know what the last school was, but I was happy I would go there,” he said.
He went. Jachie Pramso Senior High School came first, then Kumasi High School, then the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, each step a realization of a promise made in a village classroom by a man who had never set foot in a university himself.
Dr Adutwum’s story is, at its heart, a reminder that ambition does not always arrive fully formed. Sometimes it comes disguised as a father’s imperfect translation of a headteacher’s praise, and that is enough.
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