When 824 newly qualified lawyers stood proudly at their call to the bar ceremony on October 10, the celebration masked a deeper national conversation brewing across Ghana’s policy circles, universities, and development forums.
The question being asked isn’t whether these young lawyers deserve their success. It’s whether Ghana is producing the right mix of professionals to solve its most urgent problems.
Professor Raymond Atuguba, former Dean of the University of Ghana Law School, recently made a striking claim. Ghana’s lawyer to population ratio stands at one lawyer for every 5,000 citizens, far below the internationally acceptable standard of one lawyer to 250 citizens. By his calculation, Ghana desperately needs more lawyers, not fewer.
But walk through Ghana’s cities and villages, and a different reality emerges. Rivers choked with mining sediment. Roads that crumble after every rainy season. Farms struggling with outdated methods. Processing plants that exist only in policy documents. These aren’t problems that need legal arguments. They need solutions that can be built, programmed, cultivated, and engineered.
“We’re brilliant at debating what should be done,” said one frustrated ministry official who spoke on condition of anonymity. “But when it comes to actually building something, we struggle. You can’t litigate a bridge into existence.”
The concern isn’t about diminishing the value of legal professionals. Lawyers defend rights, interpret laws, and maintain social order. Ghana needs them. But critics worry the country has created an imbalance, channeling too many bright minds toward law while starving other critical sectors of talent.
Consider the typical Ghanaian ministry or government agency. Senior positions overflow with legal training. Cabinet meetings resemble courtroom debates. Parliament spends more time on procedural arguments than implementation strategies. Meanwhile, technical experts who understand water treatment, agricultural systems, or infrastructure design often sit on the sidelines.
The distinction matters because lawyers and engineers think differently. A lawyer asks whether something is legal, permissible, or defensible. An engineer asks whether something will work, scale, or last. When Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew set out to transform his tiny nation, he was a lawyer by training. But he surrounded himself with engineers, urban planners, and technocrats who could turn vision into concrete reality.
China’s remarkable transformation after 1978 was led largely by engineers who approached governance as system design. They thought in interconnected networks, feedback loops, and long term consequences. They built not just infrastructure but entire industrial ecosystems.
Ghana’s challenges today are overwhelmingly technical. How do you stop illegal mining from destroying water bodies? That requires environmental engineering, geological expertise, and technological monitoring systems. How do you modernize agriculture to feed a growing population? That needs agronomists, irrigation specialists, and supply chain logistics. How do you build functioning public transportation? That demands civil engineers, urban planners, and systems architects.
Yet year after year, Ghana’s universities produce graduates who can craft elegant legal arguments but may struggle to design a functional waste management system. The political class speaks eloquently about development but often lacks the technical literacy to distinguish viable projects from expensive fantasies.
“We’re trapped in a cycle,” explained a policy analyst at a Accra based think tank. “We debate endlessly about what laws we need, what policies sound good, what speeches will win votes. But we’re not building nearly enough. And you can’t eat a policy document.”
The 824 new lawyers represent years of hard work and will contribute meaningfully to Ghana’s justice system. Nobody questions their individual value. But the larger question persists about whether Ghana’s educational priorities match its development needs.
Does the country need more professionals who can interpret what exists, or more who can create what doesn’t yet exist? More people trained to argue within boundaries, or more trained to push beyond them? More graduates skilled in precedent, or more skilled in innovation?
Other developing nations that achieved rapid transformation made deliberate choices. They invested heavily in engineering schools, technical universities, and applied sciences. They sent thousands to study manufacturing, software development, renewable energy, and systems engineering. They made building things a higher priority than debating things.
Ghana hasn’t made those same choices, at least not at the same scale. And the results show. Brilliant speeches, impressive policy documents, and sophisticated legal frameworks exist alongside crumbling infrastructure, struggling industries, and environmental crises that worsen each year.
The contrast reveals itself in everyday life. Walk into any government office and you’ll likely find lawyers dominating senior management. Walk onto a construction site or agricultural research station and you’ll often find those critical sectors starved of top talent and resources.
“My son wants to study engineering,” shared a parent from Kumasi who attended a recent career fair. “But everyone tells him law is more prestigious, more secure. That’s the mindset we’re fighting. We’ve made arguing about problems more attractive than solving them.”
Some argue Ghana simply needs both more lawyers and more engineers, that it’s not an either or choice. Perhaps. But with limited educational resources, scholarship funding, and national attention, priorities matter. Every student Ghana channels into law school is potentially a student not studying environmental science, agricultural engineering, or renewable energy technology.
The 5,000 to one lawyer ratio that Professor Atuguba cited may indeed be below international standards. But those same international standards also measure engineers per capita, scientists per capita, and researchers per capita. On those metrics, Ghana’s gaps may be even more alarming, and more directly connected to the country’s development struggles.
As the 824 new lawyers begin their careers, Ghana faces a choice about its future. Will it continue producing graduates trained primarily to interpret and argue? Or will it shift toward producing more graduates trained to build, innovate, and solve?
The nation’s future won’t be decided in courtrooms. It will be constructed on building sites, cultivated on farms, generated from solar panels, purified in water treatment plants, and programmed in software. For that future, Ghana needs all hands on deck, including lawyers. But it may need welders, agronomists, environmental engineers, and system designers even more urgently.
The debate continues, but the rivers keep flowing with sediment, the roads keep crumbling, and the clock keeps ticking on Ghana’s development aspirations.
Source: newsghana.com.gh
