THE PLACE OF PRE-BAR EXAMS IN THE KENYAN LAW CURRICULUM

I set to imagine what an introduction of pre-bar exams portends for aspiring lawyers, the profession and the parents who bid their all for their children’s education. Clearly, there is an urgent need to revisit the curriculum. I also understand that the law profession is flooded with every Tom, Dick and Harry who all aspire   to set shop as lawyers despite their obvious lackluster education. All that, to some extent, vindicates every effort to devise stringent regulations for admission to Kenya School of Law. But it turns ugly when you know it is the dreams and ambitions of many an innocent student you are going to wreck

Yearly, throngs of ambitious students apply to leading institutions that offer law with the sole aim of reveling in the prestige associated with legal scholarship and practice. As years go by, the stakes go higher so that only the most deserving ultimately make it through the process. This is the backdrop of a slew of regulatory measures ensuing, especially in Kenya, from bodies charged with oversight such as Council for Legal Education (CLE).

Kenya has ten institutions, both private and public, accredited to offer law. CLE is tasked with the mandate to oversee and streamline their various curricula while at the same time ensuring quality standards are upheld in the respective faculties. With such a strong and ever vigilant body in place, one would assume that law degrees manufactured from each of these institutions would be top notch. Regrettably, however, there is an ever-increasing discontent with the caliber of law graduates churned out of law schools. The dust has not settled on the sensational claims of one Ahmednassir Abdullahi, a fiery, astute but egotistical senior counsel that some University produce half-baked lawyers.  Ahmednassir may not be a darling to many thanks to his fiendish disposition that usually thrusts him into the thick of raging controversies, but what he said is not completely false- It is true that some universities produce half-prepared lawyers. The fact is quality has been watered down by almost all Kenyan law faculties in the rush to admit so many students in order to get funds for ongoing projects. And justice is not to make poor students who have nothing but big aspirations pay for the greed of most of these institutions.

Now the new Kenya School Of Law(KSL)  chief executive officer P.L.O Lumunba  issued an official  statement during the admission  of new students to  the Advocates Training program(ATP) that there is a plan of reducing the number of students being admitted to the program from 1600 to only 500, he also added that the institution has introduced  Pre-bar exams, which every student who intends to join the ATP will have to sit for to be admitted.

In as much as the CLE has powers to regulate this profession , that power is in my opinion being misused, the introduction of Pre-bar exams is a cheap tactic employed by the Council to close out young ambitious, brilliant graduates who have been well equipped from their respective institutions that the council itself accredited to offer law and hence confident on the quality of education the graduates have gone through, some institutions if not all of them teach the same units that are being taught at KSL, it beats logic when the CLE decidesto introduce pre-bar exams. This is indirectly admitting that they failed in their mandate to regulate quality in the students’ undergraduate studies and so want to right it only too late when the would-be-lawyers want to join KSL.  As law students we are against this. And it is not because we dread examinations- It is because the examinations are not introduced in good faith. The greatest fear of the student body is that this is a means used to achieve the 500 limit of admission to the ATP, meaning a bigger percentage of students will be closed out of the program.

The CLE is basically killing young people’s careers;it’s using its powers to discourage young ambitious minds from joining the profession, it’s becoming apparent that getting admitted to the bar in Kenya is tougher than the Inns Of Court in the United kingdom. The regulators of this profession are usingtheir power to mint money out of poor young students in the legal profession. Picture this, currently the program has 1600 students , less than 200 student pass the Bar Exam during the first round, others pass after several re-sits and re-marks , now for a single re-sit a student pays  Kshs. 10,000 and re-marks at Kshs. 15,000 respectively ,  fees for the whole ATP process is Kshs. 190,000. I am also certain that since pre-bar has been introduced one will definitely be required to pay a certain amount to necessitate the invigilation and marking of those exams. If these billions of money raised by the Council were used to build another Law School maybe outside Nairobi in the spirit of devolution, then such scrupulous actions of the council will be warranted 

As The Law Student Society of Kenya (LSSK) body,   we are concerned that the strategies being employed by the CLE are malicious and simplistic. These actions are in effect denying many a deserving student their right to education by introducing almost insurmountable hurdles on the way to completing the Advocates Training Program. The council should confine its mandate to regulation of quality standards and not the numbers of students that enroll to further their education in Kenya School of Law. It is barbaric to turn back ambitious and diligent students who have toiled and moiled during their undergraduate with simplistic reasons such as the need to regulate the numbers of students getting to KSL. To get it into perspective, it is like sending out a thousand invitations to a party, then on the d-day, turning away nine hundred of the people that show up claiming there are no enough drinks. 

 *the views expressed herein are those of the LSSK fraternity.