When parents send their children to school, they entrust the state with their most precious assets.
The school is supposed to be a sanctuary for learning, character formation and protection. But a troubling pattern of sexual abuse in our basic and senior high schools is shattering that trust and demanding urgent systemic reform.
The latest case, the multiple sexual assault allegations against the Headmaster of Obuasi Senior High Technical School, Zakaria Abdulai, has rightly outraged the nation.
Brought to light by investigative journalist Manasseh Azure Awuni, the allegations, after initial denials, have now triggered a cascade of official actions — the suspension of the headmaster by the Minister of Education and a Police Criminal Investigations Department probe.
The authorities have asked the Ashanti Regional Director of Education, Dr William Amankrah Appiah, and the Obuasi East Municipal Director of Education, Kwamena Owusu-Nketiah, to step aside. Similarly, his own party, the National Democratic Congress, has asked the headmaster to resign as Juaben Constituency Secretary.
These decisive actions are commendable.
But they are reactive.
They respond to a scandal after it has broken, after trauma has been inflicted, after the media glare.
What we need is a proactive system that prevents abuse, detects it early, and deals with it impartially without waiting for an investigative journalist to do the work of the state.
That is why we fully endorse the call by Child Rights International (CRI) and its Executive Director, Bright Appiah, for an independent body with the powers of an authority to be set up to handle child protection and welfare.
To the CRI, this can simply be done by elevating the counselling unit of the Ghana Education Service (GES) to assume that role.
Currently, the GES counselling unit is a department within it — underfunded, understaffed, without powers, and most critically, without independence.
How can a unit within the GES impartially investigate a Regional Director or a powerful headmaster who is part of the same hierarchy?
How can a student confidently report sexual abuse by a headmaster to a counsellor who reports to that same headmaster?
The structure itself creates conflict of interest, fear of victimisation, and cover-ups.
Mr Appiah has catalogued about 11 of such cases across five regions between 2018 and 2025 .
In most of these cases, the GES set up internal committees, but the outcomes were never made public.
This secrecy breeds impunity.
An independent Child Welfare and Protection Authority, clothed with statutory powers, would strengthen impartiality, protect complainants, and ensure that concerns about children's safety are addressed without undue institutional influence.
We also support the second proposal by CRI — the integration of professional social welfare officers into basic and secondary schools.
Guidance and counselling in many schools is handled by teachers with an extra schedule, not by trained child psychologists or social workers.
They lack the expertise for case management, trauma counselling, referral and follow-up.
Professional social welfare officers, with clear reporting lines outside the school hierarchy, would provide the professional firewall needed.
Some will argue that this is another bureaucracy.
The Daily Graphic disagrees.
Consider the investment.
Government spent over GH¢20 billion on education in 2022, GH¢23 billion in 2023, GH¢32 billion in 2024, and GH¢42 billion in 2025.
In 2025 alone, GH¢9.12 billion went to basic education and GH¢11.88 billion to second cycle — nearly 50 per cent of the education budget.
What is the value of this huge investment if the very children we are investing in are not safe?
The pattern is not just about individual perverts; it is a systemic failure.
When sexual abuse occurs, the instinct of many institutions is to protect their reputation, not the child.
The victim is transferred, the perpetrator is quietly moved to another school, the report is buried.
This must end. We need zero tolerance.
The Obuasi case must be the last of its kind where we wait for the media to expose evil.
Our pre-tertiary schools house over six million children.
They deserve a system that is more responsive than the headlines.
We spend billions to educate them.
Let us now spend the political will to protect them.
