By Dr. Ishmail Pamsm-Conteh
Justice in Sierra Leone is an issue which has been under scrutiny and debate for a quite a long time. There have been allegations galore of bribery, correction and the delay in passing court judgements, amongst others. This had even preceded the country’s eleven-year long civil war between 1991 and 2002. Sadly the situation has not changed much, since.
But what is justice? The loose definition of the word is “the establishment or determination of rights according to the rules of law or equity”. Hence, if justice is related to understanding of the law, there is a link between the quality of legal education and training and administering of justice in our judicial or court system.
The Country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission report, released in 2004, found that lawyers and jurists in Sierra Leone had failed to stand up to the systematic violation of the rights of the people and that the judiciary shared responsibility for the outbreak of war.
This report also finds support from a World Bank Group Report of 2017 which states thus: “Sierra Leoneans are significantly more likely than most Africans to distrust the courts and to perceive judges and magistrates as corrupt. Very few Sierra Leoneans even use the courts.”
The country ranks sixth lowest, among 36 African countries surveyed in 2014/2015, in the proportion of citizens’ reporting contact with the court system.
It is for this reasons that legal education and training of our lawyers is worthy of examining with a view to highlighting how it impacts on the quality of justice in our country. This is done within the context of knowledge production and knowledge transferred from lecturer to students.
This is why it is of essence to reflect on the qualifications of law lecturers at the various institutions (Fouray Bay College, Njala University and University of Makeni), that offer law degrees in our country. It is also astonishing to note that none of these universities offer a postgraduate or masters law degree.
And it is worthy to note majority of the lecturers in these universities are lawyers with only undergraduate degrees, and a handful with a master’s degree, or judges. For those academic institutions calling the situation woefully inadequate will be an understatement. This problem should be seen as a wholly Sierra Leonean problem which needs to be addressed in order to improve our quality of justice.
It is therefore important to distinguish between a lawyer and an academic, so that the point is made as to why this issue of legal training and education needs to be addressed.
An academic is a person who teaches in a college or university, and it does not involve the individual having practical skills for that job role. To gain employment as a lecturer, in the UK, the US and now Ghana, as with most other world class universities, the person would need a good degree, like a first class or upper second class, relevant to the subject to be taught. The person also needs to have completed or is working towards a postgraduate Master’s, leading to a PhD degree and has academic work published. This is the position Ghana has now adopted by making it mandatory for University lecturers to hold a PhD degree. The difference in qualification required to become a university lecturer and a lawyer is quite stark.
For example, to obtain a PhD degree in most cases, the person must have held an undergraduate degree, which takes 3 years, a Master’s degree which takes 1 year, and the doctorate degree that takes another 4 years. The total years required to attain such a degree is therefore 8 years at the minimum, though some spend considerably longer time.
On the other hand, to qualify as a lawyer the individual only needs a 3-year undergraduate degree plus one year to do the vocational training. A total of 4 years is therefore required to become a lawyer. Also, the aim of a lecturer is to bring out the best in the student for them to achieve their potential. Whilst a lawyer’s aim is to win cases in court.
The skills required to be an academic and that of a lawyer are quite different too. For a lawyer these include having good communication skills, good judgement, analytical skills, Research skills, creativity, commercial awareness, teamwork, organisational skills and paying attention to detail. This list is by no means exhaustive. As a lawyer these are the skills needed in the court room, which are pitted against colleague lawyers, where the judge serves as an umpire. While an academic teaches the law to people who are not conversant with the law, the skills required are therefore different. Here, an academic must have a good public speaking ability, fantastic time management, self-motivation, interpersonal communication, and effective record keeping, amongst other skills.
These two professions are evidently different, in terms of skills and training required. Although some lawyers could be academics and vice versa – that is if the academic qualifications and training are met.
The connotation of this to the quality of justice is simply around the fact that the time needed to qualify as an academic would have developed the lecturer to be able to gain sufficient knowledge in the area of expertise which could be transferred to the students.
The knowledge comes in various forms, such as conducting research and publishing or disseminating such findings. In conducting those researches, it brings the researcher to speed on the current trajectory of the law imbibed with the opinions of other scholars in the same field. And it is more likely that the academic in their research would have engaged with colleague scholars thereby expanding the discussions in the field.
That is why in the academic world, it’s either “publish or perish.” It is little wonder some of the quality research findings by academics and scholars are quoted by judges in some of their judgements.
These universities have offered very little research in the field of legal studies, therefore students taught by these lecturers hardly know about the development and changes in the law, as the lecturers themselves are hardly aware of the current trajectory in the areas of legal studies.
This knowledge which students are not armed with affects their understanding of the law. In all essence when they graduate after 4 years, spend a year at the Sierra Leone Law School( where students undergo their training), and after their pupillage they become full-fledged lawyers, charged with dealing with matters of justice without attaining the required level of legal education.
The legal training there is also largely inadequate. Due to the fact that most of the lecturers there are also lawyers and judges who are sometimes also lecturers at those universities which had provided them with legal education.
One is tempted to argue that because it is a specialist training, they should be trained solely by lawyers and judges. That is a position which cannot be justified. One has to only look at the various universities abroad that offer such training, to note that in the majority of those universities that offer legal training, it is done largely by academics.
Classroom sizes at the Law School also hamper knowledge delivery. It is not uncommon for classrooms to have close to seventy students at any one time.
One of the findings in a research conducted by Daniel Yelkpieri and others at the University of Education in Winneba in Ghana states: “Large class size does not afford lecturers an opportunity to pay attention to weaker students and for the lecturers to do remedial teachings”
It is strange to note that the Sierra Leone Law School does not offer “student hours” or “office hours” where students would seek pastoral support or other kinds of support to assist them in their learning. Nor does the School offer students individual or personal tutors. This leaves students with no one to turn to, when faced with either personal or academic problems.
The library does not have current editions of books, and lectures are mainly by dictation, where the lecturer comes to class and reads from books or from his notes. There is a complete absence of online sources such as academic journals and access to the internet. These are what constitute modern-day learning. Absenteeism by some lecturers is rife. This is due to the fact that most lecturers are into private practice as well, which affects commitment, efficiency and service delivery. It is for this reason that in Nigeria, under their 1999 Constitution, Sections 1 and 2 (b) of the Fifth Schedule of their constitution, forbids public officials from practicing in any private institution, local or international.
Sadly, it is even possible that students may have spent their entire legal education and training (5 years) to be lawyers, without having ever read a law textbook or a journal article. Their education has been solely reliant on the notes that the lecturers read out to them. And for some lecturers you would only score marks in the exams if the answers given were based on the notes. The question students ask themselves is this: why even bother to read textbooks when all what lecturers want is for the student to give them back the notes that they had previously read out to them.
To be clear, lawyers without the prerequisite academic qualification could still lecture at university in the most exceptional circumstances. And in those exceptional cases the lawyers would have contributed immensely to legal scholarship, by way of being authors of legal texts or having published pedagogic works in peer reviewed academic journals. But what we have done at our universities is to make this the norm rather than the exception.
In any case these lawyers and judges should be given credit for their roles in educating our lawyers, when one considers the time and resources required to earn the academic qualification to become a lecturer.
However, it would be fitting and proper to encourage those lawyers who have a passion for teaching, to acquire the correct skills and qualification to be properly suited to lecture at our universities. Importantly, if the examples of Ghana and Nigeria are followed it would be a giant step forward in that direction in improving on the quality of justice based on the knowledge production.
And until legal education and training is reformed to meet with the present-day legal challenges, the quality of justice served in our country which has a direct correlation to the legal education and training of our lawyers, would continue to be suspect.
This is why we need these changes to include academics being at the fore front of legal education in our country. To also include an improved learning environment especially smaller classes, a review of subjects that are taught, improved teaching methods such as power point presentations, use of on-line or electronic resources such as journal articles, and for students to have access to recent editions of books at their law libraries. Our universities should also try to offer post graduate studies, in other to address this shortfall.
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