Parliament, others not doing enough to reform legal education – Kofi Bentil

A Private legal practitioner and senior vice president of the policy think tank, IMANI Africa, Kofi Bentil has expressed disappointment in the lack of reforms in Ghana’s legal education system despite constant calls for a review.

Mr. Bentil was among a group of lawyers who led law students to campaign for reforms last year, following the mass failure in the Bar exam.

A year on, no reforms have taken place, and the Ghana School of Law has recorded yet another abysmal result in the Bar exam.

This year’s results have been described as the worst ever recorded by the School.

The students have already petitioned Parliament again over the matter.

Mr. Kofi Bentil told Citi News the leadership has failed in that regard.

“It is very disappointing. When you live in a situation like this, you will like to hope that there are people who are looking out to make sure that the system is the best that it can be. We let this problem fester for years and we have to take it to the highest level to try and force some kind of change so that we do not end up in the kind of catastrophe we find ourselves in.”

“We made appeals to Parliament, to the leadership of the law school and many other important people. All of whom said that they are going to do something about it and everybody goes to sleep and it does not look like much has been done. They will tell you they are doing something but clearly it is not enough.”

Lecturers, including Justices of the Supreme and Appeals Courts, together with some seasoned lawyers are livid over the recent School of Law exam results which has been described as the worst Bar exam results recorded in the history of the school.

They have since threatened to resign en bloc over the mass failure.

‘Law students not to blame for mass exams failure’

An immediate past executive of the Students Representative Council (SRC) of the Ghana School of Law, Isaac Wilberforce Mensah, recently noted that the high number of failures recorded in the final exams for students of the school was not the result of a lack of preparedness on the part of the students.

According to him, the students put a great deal of work into their studies, even before getting into Law School and hence, cannot be accused of lack of effort.

He suggested that the problem was an indication of a problem with the General Legal Council.

“The only new introduction to this system is the people setting the questions and the people who are marking, not the lecturers. So it can’t be the lecturers that are not teaching well. It has to do with the marking. There is something wrong, and it is not the fault of the lecturers as well, because the lecturers would teach and it appears it is not the lecturers that are marking,” he added.

Source: citinewsroom.com