Each year, Ghana celebrates the call to the Bar of hundreds of new lawyers in what has become a recurrent moment of prestige, pride, and perseverance.
Legal education has become a national obsession, with thousands struggling to enter law faculties and the Ghana School of Law.
The Attorney General and Minister of Justice, Dr. Dominic Akuritinga Ayine’s ongoing reforms – abolishing the Ghana School of Law’s monopoly and decentralising legal training – promise to open the doors even wider.
But while we celebrate the rise of lawyers, we must confront a sobering truth: Ghana is not producing enough engineers, doctors, scientists, and technicians—the very professionals who build the real economy that drives litigation.
Ghana has about 11,000 lawyers, with roughly 8,000 actively practising, according to available data. This translates to about one lawyer for every 2,000 citizens.
Yet, some engineering and science departments in our universities graduate fewer than ten students annually. This imbalance is not just academic—it is existential, and it speaks to the development priorities of our dear nation.
While many have proffered various theories for this anomaly in an attempt to justify it, the truth remains that we cannot litigate our way to development.
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. Neither will it establish a business and employ any of the hundreds of unemployed graduates idling about.
Exodus of Critical Professionals
While the legal profession is enjoying adequate—if not excess—replenishment, Ghana is bleeding its most essential talent.
A recent study found that 71.8% of Ghanaian doctors intend to emigrate, with the United States of America, the United Kingdom, and Canada as top destinations.
The reasons are painfully familiar: poor working conditions, low pay, slow career progression, and lack of postgraduate training.
The International Council of Nurses reports that Ghana loses between 400 to 500 nurses every month to emigration. Even though our health workforce density has doubled in two decades—from 16.56 to 41.92 per 10,000 people—many professionals remain unemployed due to fiscal constraints, while others leave for better opportunities abroad.
In effect, we are spending our meagre resources to train healers who heal other nations. We are educating builders who build elsewhere.
And yet, we continue to produce more lawyers to argue over what we have failed to build.
Engineers Built Nations
It is a fact that nations that transformed their economies did so by prioritising engineering and technical professions:
Singapore rose from a third-world country to first-world status by investing heavily in engineering, technology, and scientific research.
China produces millions of engineers and other technical professionals every year, powering its rise as a global manufacturing and tech leader.
South Korea made engineering a prestigious profession, fundamental to its industrial success.
Germany and Japan built global reputations on engineering excellence and vocational training.
These nations did not build their futures on legal arguments only, as we seem to be doing; they built them on bridges, railways, software, and factories.
That is why Ghana needs to re-evaluate its educational investments to stop starving essential sectors such as agriculture, mining, construction, energy, and manufacturing, which contribute billions to economic growth, revenue generation, and job creation.
Despite these sectors serving as the heart and soul of the economy, technical education—through which adequate professionals will be churned out—remains underfunded and misaligned.
An August 2025 UNICEF study found that only one out of 57 Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) institutions in the Ashanti Region offers agricultural training, despite high demand.
Information, communication and technology (ICT) training is similarly scarce. The Commission for Technical and Vocational Education and Training (CTVET) warns of a skills mismatch and infrastructure strain due to rising enrolment without adequate investment.
Lawyers Need the Real Economy
Let me emphasise that I know the value of legal education. I assembled a formidable legal team to defend myself through nearly eight years of persecution. I am, therefore, not against more lawyers.
But I, like many others, am for Ghana becoming more deliberate in nurturing the professionals who build the economy.
Lawyers are indispensable, but they thrive when the economy thrives. They draft contracts for factories, negotiate mergers or takeovers for businesses, and litigate disputes in mining, tech, banking, and manufacturing deals, among others.
Without a vibrant real sector, the legal profession has fewer cases to handle—beyond crimes related to social vices, which are largely outcomes of a faltering economy, and political persecutions like what I suffered.
That is why Ghana must rebalance its national priorities.
We must make it just as prestigious to be a neurosurgeon, a robotics engineer, or a renewable energy expert as it is to be a lawyer. We must invest in technical education, align curricula with industry needs, and retain our critical professionals. We must have vociferous advocates for an open, non-biased or non-secluded medical education system, just as my good friend, Professor Stephen Kwaku Asare, did for the opening up of the legal profession.
Let us not become a nation of brilliant litigators arguing over broken systems.
Let us not raise generations of lawyers to defend what we failed to build. Let us not celebrate the courtroom while our clinics are empty, our roads unfinished, and our industries underdeveloped.
Let us expand the real economy so that the lawyers we train have industries to advise, contracts to draft, and deals to close.
Let us build a Ghana where prestige meets productivity. Where law serves industry. Where education fuels transformation.
Let us reprioritise. Let us rebalance. And let us build—starting now.
Alhaji Seidu Agongo is a businessman and philanthropist
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