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Absolutely No Rules Were Breached By The Supreme Court

Feature Article Absolutely No Rules Were Breached By The Supreme Court
JUN 26, 2017 LISTEN

I have read several reportage pieces on the quashing of the current admissions protocol to the Ghana Law School by the Akuffo-presided Supreme Court, but I still cannot claim to fully appreciate the minute details of the admissions process that was proscribed by the Apex Court (See “Law School Saga; SC Has Breached Own Ruling – Asare” Classfmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 6/22/17).

This may partly be because I am not a professionally trained lawyer; and also partly because most of the news stories on the issue merely ran superficial rings around the real bone of contention. I, however, quite studiously followed the initial arguments mounted by Prof. Kwaku Asare, especially those aspects pertaining to the secretiveness of the exam-grading process and how students were kept out of the loop over precisely how they performed on these exams by subject areas.

I promptly take this opportunity to congratulate the old Perscovite or Perscoba, for the Mfanstipim-schooled Prof. Aare did his Advanced-Level or pre-university certification at Okwawu-Nkwatia’s St. Peter’s Secondary School (PERSCO).

Well, in its ruling on Thursday, June 22, 2017, the Supreme Court noted that it was unconstitutional for the General Legal Council (GLC), the judicial establishment charged with setting the standards for the training of legal practitioners in the country, to ask applicants to the Ghana Law School to write an entrance examination, as well as to be subjected to an interviewing process prior to being admitted to the globally renowned “University of Makola,” as the Ghana Law School is popularly known.

The Supreme Court noted that the General Legal Council had been in violation of Legislative Instrument (LI) 1296 for as long as the current practice has been in existence. But significantly and apparently paradoxically, the Apex Court also said that the new exam- and interview-free Ghana Law School admissions process must begin in the 2018-19 admissions season. This is where Prof. Asare seems to have his reservations about the Supreme Court’s ruling, in view of the fact that the present constitutional illegality has been allowed to prevail for far too long.

In theory, the lead plaintiff to the case is absolutely dead-on-target to question why the Supreme Court would permit 2017-18 applicants to the Ghana Law School to go through a process that has long been determined to be patently unconstitutional, and just recently been effectively proscribed by the Apex Court.

Unfortunately for Prof. Kwaku Asare, ours is a world of practical reality, where changes do not occur by the mere toss of a coin. He is a professionally trained lawyer, and so I need not remind Prof. Asare that in the case of the decision by the US Supreme Court, in 1954, to have all publicly operated schools here in the United States desegregated, the Court was fully aware that the decades-old pathological tradition of racial segregation was unconstitutional. And yet, the SCOTUS or the Supreme Court of the United States admonished state governors and education administrators to see to the desegregation of all public schools with “all deliberate haste.”

Now, I am quite certain that Prof. Asare fully appreciates the fact that the semiotic concept of “deliberate haste” is an unmistakable contradiction in terms. You see, Apex Courts often look at the practical realities of the dynamics of human and social institutions.

The Akuffo Supreme Court clearly recognizes the fact that the General Legal Council needs at least a half-year’s amplitude to comfortably and effectively switch over to the new system which, like America’s odious system of racial segregation, ought not to have been allowed to prevail or exist, to begin with.

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