Speeches

BHOBU NA – Fundraising Dinner

Theme: “Empowering Tomorrow’s Great Minds and Hearts”

Mr. Chairman, the President, Dr. James Doe and Executive Council of the BHOBU-NA, respected patrons and donors, special guests, ladies and gentlemen — and above all, my fellow Bishop Herman College school mates,

Good evening.

I bring you warm greetings from the President of BHOBU INEC, Dr. Richard Bayitse and his Executive. They extend their congratulations on your launching of the BHOBU Endowment Fund—an initiative that will go a long way to help alleviate the challenges facing our college and secure its future. Once again thank you.

It is said that when a tree remembers its roots, it does not fear the storm. Tonight, looking across this room — at the faces of men and women who walked those same corridors, sat under those same mango trees, and heard that same bell ring — I am reminded, powerfully, that we are a people who remember our roots.

And tonight, we are here not merely to reminisce. We are here to build.

Bishop Herman College did not simply give us certificates. She gave us character.

She gave us the discipline to wake before the sun. The resilience to study by lantern light when the power failed. The humility to learn from teachers who poured themselves out for us — sometimes for wages that barely covered their transport. She gave us friendships that have outlasted careers, marriages, and continents.

When I think of Bishop Herman, I do not think first of the classrooms — I think of the values forged within them. The sense that excellence was not optional. That integrity was not negotiable. That service to others was not charity — it was duty.

Those values did not belong to us alone. They were planted in us so that we could replant them — in our communities, in our professions, in our children, and yes — in the next generation of students who will walk through those gates long after we are gone.

But I must speak plainly tonight, as Bishop Herman taught us to do.

The students walking those grounds today are inheriting a world that is more complex, more competitive, and in many ways more unforgiving than the one we entered. The economy has shifted. The job market has transformed. The skills demanded of tomorrow’s leaders go far beyond what any single underfunded classroom can provide.

Many brilliant young people — young people with the same fire we had, the same hunger — are being left behind. Not because they lack potential, but because they lack access. Access to science labs that are equipped. Access to libraries that are stocked. Access to teachers who are motivated and supported. Access to the kind of mentorship that tells a young girl from a small town in Peki Avetile in the Volta Region or Ayalolo near Kantamanto in Accra: Yes — you can be a doctor. Yes — you can be an engineer or a Bishop. Yes — the world is waiting for you.

That gap between potential and opportunity is not a small problem. It is a generational emergency.

And we the old students of Bishop Herman are exactly the kind of people history is asking to respond to it.

Our theme tonight — Empowering Tomorrow’s Great Minds and Hearts — is not an accident of words. Note that it says minds AND hearts.

Because a great mind without a great heart builds weapons. A great heart without a great mind gives without wisdom. But when the two are united — when intellect is married to empathy, when ambition is guided by conscience — that is when we produce the kind of leader the world desperately needs.

Bishop Herman has always understood this. Our school did not just produce scholars. She produced human beings. People of faith, of compassion, of community. People who did not ask only “what can I earn?” — but “what can I give?”

The task of empowerment, therefore, is not merely academic. It is also moral. It is spiritual. We are not just funding classrooms tonight. We are investing in the kind of souls who will lead with both brilliance and grace.

So, what does this mean for each of us here tonight?

It means that the cheque we write tonight is more than a donation — it is a declaration. A declaration that we have not forgotten where we came from. That we believe the next Albert, the next Amenya, the next Kofi, the next Alex sitting in Form One at Bishop Herman College deserves every chance we were given — and more.

Every scholarship funded tonight puts a student through who might otherwise have dropped out. Every laboratory equipped tonight opens a door to science, to medicine, to innovation. Every teacher supported tonight multiplies the impact tenfold — because one great teacher does not shape one student; she shapes hundreds across a lifetime.

I want to challenge every person in this room tonight. Do not give at the level of your comfort. Give at the level of your gratitude. Think of the teacher who believed in you when you did not believe in yourself. Think of the bursary that kept you in school when your family’s finances faltered. Think of the friend you made in that dormitory who still answers your calls at midnight.

That is what you are preserving tonight. That is what you are passing forward.

I want to paint you a picture of what success looks like.

Five years from now, a young woman is the first in her village to receive a university scholarship in engineering. She credits a mentor she met through the Bishop Herman alumni network. Ten years from now, a young man is running a social enterprise that employs fifty people in his community. He will tell anyone who listens that it was a Bishop Herman bursary that kept him in school in Form Three when his father lost his job.

Twenty years from now, someone in this room tonight — perhaps you, perhaps your child — will sit at a fundraising dinner of their own, and they will say: “It started with Bishop Herman. It started with a group of old students who refused to let the legacy die.”

That is the work we are doing tonight. Not just for today’s students — but for the generations we will never meet, who will nonetheless carry the fruit of what we plant here.

Ladies and gentlemen, the world does not need more cynics. It does not need more bystanders. It needs people who have been shaped by something greater than themselves — and who choose, at every fork in the road, to give that gift to someone else.

We are Bishop Herman. We were built to serve. We were built to lead. We were built to empower.

Tonight, let us honour that calling.
Let us open our hands — and in doing so, open the future.

Thank you, God bless you, and God bless Bishop Herman College.

It is with much respect and pleasure that I welcome all to the first ever Bishop Herman Old Boys Union of North America endowment dinner dance fundraiser. Three years ago the alumni fraternity was restarted. The school gate with frontage beautification of Bishop Herman College was chosen as our first project. The intent was to create a positive image of the school and boost confidence in the alumni that their donations will be used to complete chosen projects. This project was completed and handed over to the school administration on January, 28th 2026. I wish to thank all donors who contributed towards the construction of the school gate and frontage beautification project. 

The long term plan of BHOBU-NA is to continue to support Bishop Herman College sustainably without continuously having to tax our alumni. Today we are gathered here for the first BHOBU-NA endowment dinner dance with the aim to raise money for the fund. The theme for the endowment fund is “Empowering tomorrow’s great mind and heart”, calling to mind the fact that your donations will go toward a great goal, providing support to improve the infrastructure and resources that will empower future generations that graduate from our alma mater. With this in mind I urge all alumni, friends, loved ones, businesses and donor organizations everywhere to contribute generously toward the endowment fund.