GHANA LAW SCHOOL ... SAY WHAT ???

This issue is one that lies right under my heart, vertically. Normally, when issues are in that position around my organs, i don't like to write about them because I've learned there's a cord that links directly from my organs (all of them) to the subjective part of my brain which means ofcourse that such write ups may not be objective. I leave you to make that conclusion after you read, which means, from here on, I have procured a license to be as unguarded as I possibly can.

So, legal training in Ghana has changed, I'm told. Among other changes, now, when you have an LLB from outside (the shores of Ghana, that is) and you go back home to do the bar, you have to go through a series of interviews and tests while clutching your hard earned degree under your arm (obviously not enough) and pray that you pass because not passing will mean ...? and when you pass with flying colours - dreamily, you are considered an international student and must pay fees to reflect your status. Never mind that there are people who like me, have schooled their whole life to university level in Ghana and may have only left purposefully for the procurement of an LLB. I wouldn't want to bore anyone right now with details of trying to get into Legon to study law, that is a discussion for a brighter warmer day.

Should you opt to do the bar training here (UK), when before you had to do a three month conversion at the bar school in Ghana to practice, when you have successfully been called to the UK bar, now, you would need to have done pupillage here in the UK after your bar, before that option would be open to you or your bar training from UK is null and void which loosely translates - you have to spend two years doing what you have already done - that is, if you pass the interviews and tests required ofcourse.

Now, pupillage in UK is everybody's dream. Who wouldn't want to be trained on the job in Lincoln's Inn? Go to court and experience first hand, the very place Lord Denning practised his law? Unfortunately, however, pupillage, even though considered part of legal training, is also a full time job which means that one needs a work permit to undertake the prestigious venture. Now, who born dog? where are you "going to pass" to get that permit? Even if you get divinely lucky and get a law firm that is willing to take you on, UK requirements dictate that the firm proves that basically, no one else in the kingdom can do the job apart from you for which reason a work permit should be procured for very special you.

My favourite part, by jove, is the fact that Ghana recognises the state of New York bar training but has all these limitations on recognising UK bar training. Forget colonial masters, forget where we derive our laws from, forget the multiplicity of the legal system in the States ... have I said enough?

All this would be well and good if these changes were given a human touch. It came into being within three months. So one went to bed covered in a quilt as thick as a dozen kente clothes sewn together somewhere in Birmingham as a student almost done with bar training, dreaming of returning home to family, good food, weather ... after a fight well fought and woke up to hear he must go back to his motherland to do the bar training for two years AGAIN.
Equity? Anybody??