Accra, Ghana//-The Dean of the University of Ghana Law School, Professor Raymond Atuguba, recently argued that, contrary to popular opinion, Ghana is not training too many lawyers.
The country’s current lawyer-to-citizen ratio is one lawyer to 5,000 citizens, indicating a significant disparity, as the acceptable ratio is one lawyer to 250 citizens.
Per the numbers, Ghana needs more lawyers. So, the recent graduation of over 800 new lawyers would have been cause for celebration if only our greatest national challenge were the lack of legal arguments.
As a country, our real crisis is not in the courtroom; it is in our farms, our rivers, our factories, our classrooms, our laboratories, and our infrastructure. We are concentrating our brightest minds in the wrong places – and paying a heavy price for it.
Lawyers are indispensable to a functioning society. They interpret laws, defend rights, and keep order. But a country cannot litigate itself into prosperity.
A courtroom victory does not build a bridge. A legal argument does not irrigate a farm. A brilliant submission before a judge will not turn poisoned rivers back into sources of life. The heavy dominance of lawyers in our leadership and national institutions has produced a state that is far better at writing speeches and debating motions than at designing solutions and building systems.
Lawyer vs Engineers
Lawyers are trained to interpret what exists. But Engineers are trained to create what does not exist yet.
One works within the boundaries of law; the other expands the boundaries of possibility.
One asks, “Is this legal?” The other asks, “Will this work?” One thrives on precedent; the other thrives on invention.
When a nation is fighting existential problems – from collapsing infrastructure to food insecurity to poisoned water bodies and destruction of forests – it is the second mindset (engineering) that makes the difference between survival and decline.
Ghana’s development challenges are not legal puzzles; they are engineering, scientific, and systems problems. They require people who can modernise agriculture, build processing plants, develop software platforms, construct railways, and restore degraded ecosystems. They demand people who think in terms of efficiency, scalability, feedback loops, and sustainability – not just statutes and clauses.
It is obvious that the most critical human resource we need as a country, yet, year after year, we pour our national talent and resources into producing armies of lawyers while our fields lie fallow, our industries remain underdeveloped, vast swathes of farmlands are destroyed, and our rivers die slow, poisoned deaths.
The result is visible everywhere: ministries filled with lawyers who draft policies no one implements; parliaments filled with lawyers who argue endlessly but build nothing; political parties led by lawyers who speak eloquently but cannot design a functioning waste management system. And so, we remain trapped – brilliant on paper, but broken in reality.
History shows us the contrast. Nations that rose from poverty to power – Singapore, China, South Korea – did not do so through courtroom victories. They did it by unleashing engineers, scientists, and builders to transform landscapes, industries, and futures. Even leaders who were lawyers by training surrounded themselves with technocrats and system-builders because they understood that laws alone do not build nations – systems do.
Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew (lawyer by training) surrounded himself with technocrats and engineers to build Singapore’s infrastructure, housing, and industry. China’s post-1978 rise was driven by engineer-leaders like Deng Xiaoping and Hu Jintao, who approached governance as system design. Governance is system design and execution.
A nation is not a courtroom. It is a complex system of interdependent components – roads, rails, rivers, schools, energy grids, farms, industries, ecosystems, and people. Engineers are trained to understand how such systems interact. They model long-term consequences of present actions. They think in decades, not election cycles. Lawyers, by contrast, are trained to win arguments within a framework, not design the framework itself.
The uncomfortable truth is this: Ghana does not need thousands more lawyers nearly as much as it needs thousands more engineers, agronomists, data scientists, environmental scientists, innovators, and builders. We need problem-solvers who can turn policy into pipelines, laws into logistics, and speeches into solar farms. Until we redirect our national priorities toward building rather than merely debating, we will continue producing graduates who know how to argue about the future but not how to build it.
Our future will not be written in legal briefs. It will be laid in concrete, programmed in code, harvested from the soil, generated from the sun, purified in the rivers, and forged in factories. And for that, Ghana needs fewer lawyers – and many, many more builders.
By Efo Small