Legal scholar and governance advocate Professor Stephen Kwaku Asare, widely known as Kwaku Azar, has proposed a sweeping reform to establish functional law offices for every Metropolitan, Municipal, and District Assembly (MMDA) in Ghana, arguing that local authorities are dangerously under-equipped to protect public resources and ensure legal compliance.
The proposal comes amid mounting evidence that Ghana’s decentralized governance structures are operating without the legal backbone needed to function effectively. A 2022 study by DennisLaw revealed that 154 MMDAs—59 percent of the total—operate without by-laws, leaving them without the legal authority to penalize wrongdoing or enforce regulations within their jurisdictions. The same research found that the majority of MMDAs have no legal department and no in-house lawyers, forcing them to rely intermittently on the Attorney-General’s Office.
“It is actually risky on the part of any Chief Executive Officer not to have a lawyer who guides him through the processes, because the issues relating to procurement, the issues relating to public funding are all legal issues which actually increases your criminal risk,” said Dennis Adjei Dwomoh, Managing Partner of Law Plus Ghana, commenting on the findings.
The consequences of this legal deficit are visible in the Auditor-General’s reports. In 2025, Ghana recorded its highest level of public financial irregularities in five years, with losses exceeding GH¢5.26 billion—a sharp increase from approximately GH¢2.06 billion in 2024. The Auditor-General’s report on District Assemblies specifically blamed “low level of commitment by Chief Executives, Coordinating Directors, and Finance Officers to enforce the provisions of relevant legislation” for recurring irregularities. Lawmakers have repeatedly called for lawyers to be employed in all MMDAs to curb contract and procurement breaches.
The Four Core Functions
Under Professor Asare’s proposal, every assembly law office would perform four essential functions: advising on legal and commercial transactions, including contracts, land deals, and public-private partnerships; ensuring compliance with procurement, public financial management, budgeting, and employment laws; defending assemblies in contractual disputes, negligence claims, property cases, and civil rights litigation; and proactively pursuing civil enforcement actions against violations of building, housing, planning, sanitation, and public health regulations, as well as unlawful business practices, illegal mining, and gambling.
Three Practical Solutions
Recognizing that many assemblies lack the financial resources to staff independent legal offices, Professor Asare outlined three practical proposals.
First, he proposes allowing the mandatory national service requirement to be fulfilled after enrollment at the Bar, with newly enrolled lawyers deployed to district law offices under the supervision of experienced practitioners. This would provide young lawyers with practical experience while giving assemblies access to much-needed legal expertise. The proposal aligns with a parallel initiative by the Ghana Law Society, which has announced plans to replace the current six-month pupillage with a structured 12-month national service programme posting fresh lawyers to district assemblies as assistant legal officers to assist with drafting by-laws and raising internally generated funds. The Ghana Law Society noted that more than 72 percent of the fewer than 8,000 lawyers with active practising certificates practise in Accra, Kumasi, and Tema, while more than 190 districts have no law firms at all.
Second, Professor Asare proposes partnerships between law faculties and assemblies, with universities “adopting” three or four districts. Under this arrangement, supervised law students would assist in investigating building, planning, sanitation, and environmental violations; reviewing contracts and procurement transactions; examining Auditor-General reports to identify possible legal remedies; researching public-interest litigation; and helping residents understand and enforce their legal rights. Law students could also collaborate with accounting, auditing, and procurement students on financial accountability projects, earning academic credit while providing assemblies with additional support.
Third, smaller assemblies would be encouraged to share legal resources through joint law offices supported by national service lawyers, university legal clinics, and partnerships with professional legal bodies, allowing resource-constrained districts to access legal expertise without each bearing the full cost of an independent legal office.
A Question of Deployment, Not Supply
Professor Asare emphasized that the proposals are not intended to replace experienced lawyers but to expand their capacity and make legal services more accessible to local authorities. He argued that the focus should shift from whether Ghana produces too many lawyers to how those lawyers are deployed.
“Assemblies need legal advice. Public institutions require compliance support. Communities need effective civil law enforcement, and citizens need access to justice, while newly qualified lawyers need opportunities to gain practical experience,” he said, urging stakeholders to reconsider how Ghana deploys its growing pool of legal professionals.
Professor Asare, a KPMG Professor of Accounting at the University of Florida and a Democracy and Development Fellow in Public Law and Justice at Ghana’s Center for Democratic Development, has been a consistent voice for institutional reform in Ghana, advocating for local government restructuring, legal education overhaul, and anti-corruption measures.
The proposal has found resonance among legal practitioners and policymakers concerned about the growing disconnect between Ghana’s legal training output and the unmet legal needs of its public institutions. As the Ghana Law Society’s own reform programme notes, the country “overproduces lawyers for Accra and underproduces legal service for Ghana”.
For Professor Asare, the solution lies not in limiting the supply of lawyers but in connecting that supply to the institutions that desperately need it. As he put it, “All we need is a little thinking outside the box to connect these needs with the legal talent we are producing”.
