Tune in to any morning show or evening panel on Joy Prime, TV3 or Metro TV and a pattern emerges.
Whatever the issue of the day, the conversation soon turns to what the Constitution says, what the Supreme Court held, what Article this or Act that provides.
Galamsey becomes a question of mining regulations.
Unemployment becomes a question of statutory mandates.
The panellists are increasingly lawyers. So are the moderators.
And now the journalists themselves are becoming lawyers.
When the Ghana School of Law inducted more than 1,500 students into its professional programme for the 2025/2026 academic year, familiar faces from newsrooms were in the crowd.
One veteran parliamentary correspondent says he knows at least three colleagues called to the bar and mentors others now in law school.
The path from the studio to the courtroom has become a career strategy.
Let me be clear. I am not against lawyers. A constitutional democracy needs people who understand its legal architecture, and journalists who grasp the law are harder to intimidate and mislead.
My worry is what happens when one professional vocabulary becomes the only admissible language of public reason.
When every question of how we should live together is translated into what the law permits, we quietly tell millions of Ghanaians that they have nothing to contribute.
The farmer in Techiman, the trader at Kejetia, the teacher in Bolgatanga.
These citizens hold judgements about fairness, leadership and what a good society owes its people.
But they did not read law, so our public discourse treats their reasoning as unqualified opinion, waiting to be corrected by learned counsel.
This is a subtle disenfranchisement.
Not of the ballot, but of the tongue.
It sits uneasily with our own inheritance.
The Ghanaian philosopher Kwasi Wiredu reminded us that deliberation in Akan political tradition was not the preserve of a credentialed class.
Decisions were reached through layered consultation designed so that no adult member of the community could be shut out of the decisions of the day.
Wisdom was recognised in proverbs, lived experience and moral reasoning, not only technical mastery.
Our ancestors did not need a certificate to speak at the durbar grounds.
Law tells us what is permitted. It cannot tell us what is wise, what is just, or what is worthy of us as a people.
Those are questions of politics, ethics and public morality, and every citizen holds a stake in them.
Notice
Notice what the legal reflex does to a conversation.
The moment someone asks what the Constitution says, the discussion freezes.
Everyone who is not a lawyer falls silent, waiting for the verdict of the learned.
A question that belonged to the whole nation a minute earlier now belongs to two people on the panel.
The rest of us become an audience at our own trial.
And it wastes intelligence on a national scale. Economists understand incentives.
Engineers understand systems. Farmers understand land and season.
Nurses know what a failing clinic looks like.
When every conversation defaults to counsel, we deny ourselves all of that knowledge, and we do so voluntarily.
And when the citizen finally meets the law directly, the inequality deepens.
The powerful arrive with a team of counsel.
The ordinary Ghanaian arrives alone, or not at all, because justice spoken in legalese must be purchased through interpreters most cannot afford.
A public square ruled by law is, in practice, a public square ruled by those who can pay for it.
Training
We should also be honest about what legal training produces.
Advocacy is a defensive craft.
Counsel is trained to argue a side and win, which is exactly right in a courtroom, where the accused deserves a fierce defence.
It is the wrong habit for the public square.
The great questions before Ghana are genuinely controversial, and the honest answer is often uncertain.
Such questions call for deliberation, where minds stay open to persuasion.
Advocacy hardens positions precisely where reality demands humility.
The habit has migrated into politics itself.
A striking number of our politicians are trained lawyers, and some who are not are finding their way to law school.
The skill they acquire is the advocate's skill, and the advocate can construct a defence for any position, including the indefensible.
So the obvious ceases to be obvious.
A broken promise becomes a matter of interpretation.
A plain injustice becomes a question of jurisdiction.
The public watches something it knows to be wrong get argued into ambiguity and learns a corrosive lesson: that wrongdoing needs only a good lawyer.
This is how a people begins to lose its common sense and its moral confidence.
Law is meant to serve conscience, not replace it.
A thing can be perfectly legal and deeply wrong, and every
Ghanaian knows this from ordinary life.
The Constitution did not give us our sense of right and wrong.
Our sense of right and wrong is what demanded a constitution in the first place.
A nation that outsources its conscience to its lawyers will eventually find that conscience argued away.
Balance
What might be done? Producers and editors can act tomorrow.
Balance the panels.
For every lawyer, seat a teacher, a market queen, a nurse, an economist, a chief.
Ask the legal question when it arises, then move to the questions of consequence: who benefits, who suffers, what should we do.
Allow panellists and guests to express themselves in their Ghanaian languages as much as possible, alongside English, because that is where our richest reservoirs of political reasoning live.
And to my friends in journalism now sitting in law lectures, I sincerely wish you well.
Carry your new knowledge lightly. Use it to open the conversation, not close it.
The measure of a national discourse is not how precisely it cites the Constitution.
It is how many citizens can enter it and be heard.
Ghana does not need every citizen to become a lawyer.
It needs a public square where you do not have to be one to belong.
The writer is a PhD candidate in African Studies, focusing on Public Policy and Development, Howard University,
Washington, D.C., USA.
