GIMPA gets law school

The Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration (GIMPA) has launched its Law School, with a pledge to help expand the frontiers of legal education.

This brings to three, the number of public tertiary institutions offering courses leading to the award of law degrees in the country.
The other two are the University of Ghana, Legon and the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST).

The GIMPA Law Programme  is a three-year programme that will concentrate on law for administration, management and corporate governance with greater emphasis on the economy, administration, management and corporate governance-related law courses such as commercial and company law, contract and administration.

Other areas include security transactions, banking, development and decentralisation, insurance, taxation and revenue and public policy-making.

The programme is also expected to broaden legal knowledge and produce legal brains who will work generally in the public sector especially in the areas of the economy, administration and management.

Launching the school, the Chief Justice, Mrs Theodora Georgina Wood, said the school would help fill the existing gap created by inadequate levels of quality human resource in the legal profession in Ghana, as well as train “the right calibre of lawyers tailored to suit the management needs of the country.”

She stated that law remained “critical to nation-building and development and asked that every effort must be made to expand and improve on legal education in its entirety”.

She said as the country strove to entrench its democratic credentials, there was a great need for lawyers in administration, in management and in governance both within the public and private sector.

The Chief Justice observed that the country’s decentralisation programme had suffered partly as a result of lack of persons with combined legal and management skills at the district assemblies, noting that GIMPA’s expertise in administration and management training would be brought to bear on the law programme, “so as to engender the development of legal minds for the public sector”.

Justice Wood said it was also worthy to note that the school had developed curriculum in areas like Oil and Gas Law, Environmental Law, Alternative Dispute Resolution, Health Care Law and Media Law.

The Chief Justice urged the school to develop short courses that would facilitate the training of paralegals to enable the country to have the full complement of the value chain in legal training.

The Rector of GIMPA, Professor Yaw Agyeman Badu, for his part, said the shortage of lawyers in many public and private organisations undermined national development efforts.

He said the increasing focus of the global socio-economy, the emergence of ICT which had become the integral aspect of everyday life coupled with the  discovery of oil in the country and the  emerging oil industry “have legal implications for individuals and organisations which the country must necessarily build capacity to address”.

He said the GIMPA law course was tailored to make up for the shortfall in the number of lawyers and also “correct the deficiencies in the provision of legal services in the areas listed”.

Prof Agyeman Badu said the law school would benefit from the knowledge and rich experience of the existing law schools in the country and also “extend its network beyond the shores of Ghana to tap any ideas that can help enrich the programme”.

Present at the ceremony was the chairman of the GIMPA Council, Dr Christine Amoako-Nuama, and representatives of other management schools in West Africa.

Professor Kwame Frimpong, a professor of Law and Dean of the Graduate School of Governance, Leadership and Public Management, is the Dean of the GIMPA School of Law.

Source: Daily Graphic