Law students condemn Speaker

Ken Donkor, President of the Concerned Law Students Association, has said the conduct of the Speaker of Parliament, Professor Mike Oquaye during a debate on the entrance examination for law students’ bill, was bad for Ghana’s democracy.

According to him, the Speaker conducted himself in a partisan manner, a situation he said does not augur well for Ghana’s democracy.

Parliament on Friday, 2 March 2018, approved the Legal Profession Regulations Bill amidst protests from the Minority.

The approval means the General Legal Council (GLC) will continue to conduct entrance exams at the Ghana School of Law as part of admission requirements.

The Constitutional Legal and Parliamentary Affairs and Subsidiary Legislation Committees of Parliament, led by Bawku Central MP Mahama Ayariga and Ben Abdallah, respectively, last week agreed to the request by the GLC to conduct entrance exams for law students.

It, however, rejected the conduct of interviews as part of the admission process.

The Minority, after the approval on Friday, stood on their feet for several minutes as a sign of protest to the bill.

According to them, majority of MPs voice-voted against the bill but Speaker Professor Mike Oquaye nonetheless ruled in favour of the bill’s approval.

There has been an ongoing debate on the admission requirement into the Ghana School of Law.

The debate heightened further when only 91 students out of the 474 who sat for the Bar exams this year passed. A total of 206 law students are to repeat the entire course whilst another 177 students have been referred in one or two papers.

Law students in Ghana have been calling for the scrapping of the entrance exams but the GLC wants the exams conducted.

Mr Donkor told Chief Jerry Forson on Ghana Yensom on Accra 100.5FM on Monday, 5 March that: “For me, it was a sad day for Ghana on Friday seeing the Right Honourable Speaker Mike Oquaye behaving in the very manner that he behaved.

“He is a reverend minister, a lawyer, academician and a politician of that magnitude shouldn’t have behaved in the manner he did.

“We never thought that the issue of education, in particular, legal education would have taken a partisan posture. We were praying that we should have a bipartisan decision into that fight that we have taken up as students but what we witnessed in parliament was more like NDC and NPP which wouldn’t help the cause of education in Ghana.”