Before he became king, he drove cattle. Ploughed fields with bullocks under the northern sun. Rode horses through Savelugu like any other chief with land to manage and people to feed. Nobody outside Dagbon knew his name. Then, on a January night in 2019, grass pulled from the roof of the Gbewaa Palace changed everything.

That grass, handed to him by the Kuga Naa, was the oracle’s answer. Dagbon had a new king. And Yaa Naa Abukari Mahama II — the man who used to be just Alhaji Abukari Mahama, chief of Savelugu — became the 41st overlord of one of Ghana’s oldest kingdoms.

He was born in Mion in 1939, the second child of Yaa Naa Mahama II and his queen, Ayishetu, a princess from a small community called Kulunkpegu. His father died when he was still young, barely into his teens, ruling only until 1948. That’s how it goes with Dagbon royalty — you’re born close to power, but nothing is handed to you. You climb.

And climb he did. First to Kpunkpono in the late 1990s, a lesser skin where a future king cuts his teeth. Then, in 2011, to Savelugu – one of only three gate skins that can produce a Yaa Naa. For nearly a decade after that, he was simply the Yoo Naa, a respected but unremarkable regional chief, tending his farms and his horses, waiting on a process nobody could rush.

Here’s the part of the story that gives everything else its weight. In March 2002, Yaa Naa Yakubu Andani II was murdered at the Gbewaa Palace during a bloody clash between Dagbon’s two royal gates, Abudu and Andani. What followed wasn’t just grief — it was seventeen years of a kingdom without a king. No funeral could be performed. No successor could be named. The skins of Yendi sat empty while two royal families nursed a wound that seemed like it might never heal.

It took a peace process led by the Asantehene, Otumfuo Osei Tutu II, years of quiet negotiation, and a Committee of Eminent Chiefs working through multiple Ghanaian governments to finally get both families to the table. On January 18, 2019 — the last day of Yakubu II’s long-delayed funeral rites — the kingmakers finally consulted the oracle. Four men stood as contenders. Abukari Mahama, the farmer-chief of Savelugu, was the one chosen.

His enskinment ceremony ran from January 25 to 27, 2019, and it wasn’t just a Dagbon affair. President Nana Akufo-Addo attended as guest of honour. So did former President John Mahama and former President Jerry John Rawlings. Chiefs came from Asanteman and Mamprugu. For a kingdom that had spent nearly two decades in mourning, it was, finally, a celebration.

One quiet footnote from those early days: the palace had to formally correct the record, instructing media houses to call him Ya-Na Abukari II, not Ya-Na Abukari Mahama II — a small but deliberate act of asserting his own identity as king, separate from the name he carried before the skins.

What’s struck people about Abukari II’s time on the throne isn’t grandeur. It’s construction – literal and otherwise. In 2021, he launched the Dagbon Development Fund. Two years later, he cut the sod to rebuild the Gbewaa Palace itself, the very seat that had been left to crumble during the years of vacancy, drawing donations from Dagomba communities as far away as the UK.

He also did something few expected a traditional ruler to prioritise: he rewrote the rulebook. In 2020, he set up a committee to review Dagbon’s 1930 constitution — the same document whose ambiguities had helped fuel decades of succession disputes. By 2022, the Dagbon Traditional Council had adopted the revised version. It was the kind of unglamorous, institutional work that doesn’t make for dramatic headlines but quietly protects the next generation from repeating 2002.

When disaster struck elsewhere in Ghana, he showed up too. After the 2023 Akosombo dam spillage flooded communities across the Volta Region, Abukari II sent 300 bags of maize, 100 bags of rice, and 400 tubes of yams to victims and dispatched more relief to flood-hit families in Buipe, Savannah Region. In 2024, he helped broker a partnership between Tamale Technical University and a Turkish university in Bursa, opening doors for young people in the north to access technical training most of them never thought was within reach.

In November 2025, the University for Development Studies gave him an honorary doctorate — not a ceremonial nod, but a genuine acknowledgement of what he’d rebuilt. Vice-Chancellor Professor Seidu Al-Hassan credited him with steering Dagbon’s chieftaincy away from political manipulation and toward reconciliation. As part of the honour, the king donated 500 acres of land in Yendi for a new UDS campus — his way, perhaps, of making sure the peace he fought for outlasts him.

He remains, today, an active presence in national affairs — as recently as mid-2025 he was received at Jubilee House by President John Mahama, paramount chiefs in tow, still very much the working king Dagbon chose in 2019.

For a man who spent most of his life as a farmer and a horseman, Abukari Mahama II didn’t inherit a throne so much as he inherited a wound – and set about closing it.

Yaa Naa Mahama Abukari II, the King of Dagbon who restored the Yendi throne after a 16-year chieftaincy dispute, was pronounced dead on July 13, 2026.

The death of Yaa Naa Mahama Abukari II marks the end of a reign that represented a new chapter in Dagbon’s history, following one of Ghana’s longest-running traditional leadership disputes.

His passing is expected to trigger mourning across Dagbon and beyond as stakeholders reflect on his contribution to peace and reconciliation in the kingdom.