Law school: The failure of 50 years of Independence

Feb 06, 2017 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

The Attorney-General in commenting on the law school that soon will be established, remarked that UG receives 200 law applicants each year. That figure goes down because not all are accepted; just about 80. That still does not mean that Guyana gets 80 law graduates. The figure is lowered for two reasons. Some will drop out as happens with all university programmes. And Sir Hugh Wooding only accepts 25 Guyanese. But even 25 lawyers coming into the system each year in a small population as ours can create a surfeit over a period of time.
My personal opinion is that Guyana has more lawyers than the market can accommodate but I will never accept restricting citizens in their choice of career. When the law school comes into being, that 25 number will definitely go way up. So what is wrong if the local law school adds more lawyers to the system? The answer is nothing.
The question is not what Guyana has too much of, it is what it doesn’t have at all and what it should have because of the nature of Guyana. And what is the nature of Guyana?
A huge part of Guyana sits right next to the Atlantic Ocean. Past and present generations of Guyanese have seen the regular breach of our sea defences causing severe damages to villages across this country. A large number of Guyanese also live next to our three great rivers. It would have been natural then for the country’s only university to have on its curriculum degree programmes in ocean science and sea defense engineering. Students since 1966, the year of Independence, should have been encouraged with generous scholarship grants to pursue these studies.
In countries like Holland and Norway, and in Scotland, the universities offer a wide array of degrees in petroleum engineering. Their livelihood is based on oil. When Silicone Valley was created, there was a natural spin off of computer and high- tech programmes in the US universities.
It is no exaggeration to say that it is commonsensical for leaders to see where the strengths of their countries lie and plan their educational system accordingly. India always had a large population where poverty in the villages are/was wide-spread. It was natural, then, for them to place emphasis on the study of medicine. India has the largest medical degree programme in the world. Israel because of its small size has active aqua-culture programmes in its universities.
Since Independence, our only university has never offered courses in sea defence engineering and ocean sciences. So 50 years after Independence, with an already high level of legally trained persons we are going to spend money on a law school. The school is a private venture but the Guyana Government will be contributing to it.
Although I don’t think we should deny people who opt for law as a career we need to spend money in the pursuit of more relevant skills.
If a private law school comes to Guyana, it is nobody’s business if students take their own money and pay to study law. In Guyana, School of the Nations does not offer CXC; the school offers Cambridge GCE instead. I don’t agree with that but if parents prefer GCE to CXC then that is a choice that they have a right to make.
State funds should not go into the coming law school for the brutal reason that we need every cent to spend on the pursuit of knowledge that is more relevant to the developmental needs of Guyana.
It is pathetic nonsense for a country in the 21st Century not to have forensic labs doing DNA investigations. We are putting money into a law school but we send DNA samples to Trinidad and elsewhere. It vividly indicates that as a nation, Guyana hasn’t learnt anything about nation-building after 50 years of Independence. We have been misplacing our priorities since Independence. It appears stupid when you hear the City Council’s defence of the parking meters.
The argument is that we need to become a modern nation. But surely it is an ugly joke to cite parking meters as a sign of moving towards modernization yet the very City Council sends its workers to clean dirty gutters, alleyways and trenches using primitive technology known as bucket bridge.
I see it all the time. One worker puts the debris in a bucket, it passes from one and to another until it reaches the last person who is on the road waiting to dump the stuff into waiting trucks that in most cases do not have back shutters. Funny country eh!

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Law school: The failure of 50 years of Independence

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