: The Underlying Causes Of Legal Mediocrity In Ghana
BY DR. SAMUEL ADJEI SARFO
The recent display of the Supreme Court’s untrammeled power in jailing certain Ghanaian citizens has been a great cause of concern to many enlightened people. Significant among these is Professor Asare, a Ghanaian scholar and legal luminary resident in the USA. Professor Asare has been strident and relentless in his assertion of the protective rights of Ghanaians to free speech and questioned the source, nature and wisdom of Ghana’s Supreme Court in throwing into jail those who dared question its rulings. The Chief Justice herself appears to be amenable to a criticism of the judiciary, albeit obliquely, having stated recently that Ghanaians have the right to evaluate the performance of the courts.
That our democratic freedom could be mortgaged by an intemperate and insufficiently educated judiciary is not in doubt, given the recent Supreme Court’s penchant to throw into jail through extra-judicial procedures those whose comments it sua sponte finds to be unpalatable. After all, it is the natural propensity of all people and institutions that if they are vested with absolute power, they will corrupt it absolutely. What is amazing though is the broad range of support that the court’s illegality has garnered among the Ghanaian legal elite and the general public. As if by some mass hypnoses or delusion, the Ghana Bar Association, lawyers on both sides of the ongoing petition, respected legal luminaries as well as traditional and opinion leaders have collectively praised the court’s exercise of untrammeled power and its quest to jail all those whose statements it deems contumacious. That support gives cause for concern because it exposes the analytical hiatus within the Ghanaian society and throws into doubt our commitment to democratic principles and the protection of the fundamental human rights purchased by us through decades of struggle against dictatorship and tyranny. As if by one fell swoop, we have jettisoned executive dictatorship and substituted it with the dictatorship of the judiciary, succumbing to the arrogant and misleading mantra articulated by Justice Atuguba that “the law resides in the bosom of the high court.”
More importantly, this analytical hiatus is the result of our legal training (or lack thereof). A society’s consciousness, mores and ethos are defined by the maturity of its legal system. And where the judicial system conspires to accept mediocrity as normalcy, ignorance becomes the order of the day. This present circus by the Supreme Court has been tolerated by a society that has not developed the wherewithal to see into the future of uninhibited power and is not trained to assess its ramifications.
One score and eight years ago, our government construed of a dangerous plan to water down our educational system and to breed a mass of educated illiterates masquerading as the enlightened of our society. The repercussion of this attrition against our education is evident in our present posture wherein our best citizens behave like sheep being led by a mischievous generation whose education is better but still archaic. These raconteurs perpetuate a false training of our lawyers and ensure their eternal cluelessness.
A Ghanaian lawyer finishes Law School and gets accepted into the judicial system as a matter of course, ululated by an agonistic society eager to cheer its false heroes. From this comfort zone of social respectability and idolization, such a lawyer might not read any law book, do any legal research, write any legal opinion or acquaint himself with new developments in electronic research or devices for the effective practice of Law. Majority of Ghanaian lawyers and judges are not computer literate and they have colonial mindsets that are as old and decrepit as the court buildings in which they practice! The lawyers and judges in Ghana have no system of continued education or method of self-improvement, being perpetually trapped in the old cave mentality of yesteryears while enjoying the unquestioning worship of a clueless society. Such a lawyer or judge will not qualify as a paralegal in the USA or any advanced society and will be a laughing stock in any serious legal discourse. Bereft of any confidence in reasoning and the ability for rigorous inquiry, such a lawyer has no choice but to kowtow to foolishness and certify ignorance, provided it emanates from an equally ignorant bench. And if such a lawyer were to meet his international counterparts, he can only launch into incomprehensible gibberish which he mistakes for English and become a butt for indecent jokes amongst his colleagues wondering why he is not seeking the help of a speech therapist! The time has come for us to revamp our legal education and to raise it to the highest level possible. This should begin with the re-education and retraining of all the lawyers in Ghana on new trends of legal research and writing, competent advocacy, effective communication and a pathway to an expanded curriculum reflective of international standards. Various compulsory courses and periodic examinations should be established by the General Legal Council of Ghana to train or retrain practicing lawyers and to test their competence and diligence on a regular basis. Moreover, broad categories of legal specializations should be established to encourage lawyers who choose to distinguish themselves in specific areas to have the conduit to reach their goals. A special Scholar’s College should also be set up to reward the special breed of lawyers who demean themselves in the Law and engage in research and writing to advance the corpus of legal texts in Ghana.
Ghana’s law schools should also go beyond the LLB and award the Juris Doctor/Doctor of Jurisprudence degree. This transition must be done to conform to international credentialing systems, meaning that we must radically expand our legal institutions, infrastructure, libraries, electronic and technological amenities and communication systems to meet global standards. We must keep our lawyers and judges abreast of research tools like Westlaw or Lexisnexis and compel them to acquire new knowledge in social interactive devices like Facebook, LinkedIn and Tweeter. In short, we must free them from the colonial bondage of unjustified self- importance and launch them into the realities and liberties of the present times. For those lawyers or judges who are not able to research, write or advocate in any diligent sense or those who refuse to self-improve, there should be a pathway for their relegation to mere paralegal status, until they are able to prove themselves at some future time.
All these will require the initiative and total commitment on the part of the General Legal Council in general and of the government and people of Ghana in particular. And yet this must be done, or else our judicial leaders will sit in the dark sanctum of incompetence and dictate archaic trends into our modern progressive times. The tyranny of the present Supreme Court, and the servile subservience of their illegal posturing by our legal luminaries and general public suggest a troubling pattern of ignorance within the Ghanaian elitist circles. Thus our people are in danger of losing their rights because those who must defend them are in condonation with those who will oppress us. This is therefore the time to reflect on the type of stuff with which the Ghanaian lawyer is made and to look upon ways in which to improve upon his training and stature.
Samuel Adjei Sarfo is a General Legal Practitioner with a doctoral degree in Law. You can email him at sarfoadjei@yahoo.com.
