Villagers at the Amadiba Crisis Committee meeting claim they have been misrepresented by their leadership.
Thousands of law students remain unsure of whether they will be required to complete an extra year, because the Council for Higher Education is not dealing with the controversial question.
Instead, it said it plans to leave the decision of whether to extend the bachelor of law (LLB) degree by a year to the institutions to resolve.
Students, both those enrolling this year at universities and those completing the four-year LLB, will have to wait until the release of the review into the quality of the present law degree by the council and then for institutions to meet to decide on recommended changes to the syllabus.
The decision to introduce a four-year degree in 1997, to make it cheaper for disadvantaged students, became the subject of heated debate just a few years after it was implemented, with law firms and judges raising concerns about the quality of law students coming out of universities.
Previously, students completed a three-year undergraduate degree, followed by a postgraduate two-year LLB.
Earlier this year the University of the Witwatersrand decided to scrap the four-year LLB for next year’s intake and return to the previous five-year requirement. There was mixed reaction to this decision.
The legal sector largely welcomed it, but some expressed outrage.
The Black Lawyers Association thought the move was premature, criticising Wits for not waiting for the outcome of a review by the council.
The South African Students Congress said a decision, such as that by Wits, to extend the degree would prevent poorer students from entering the legal profession because they would not be able to afford it.
South African Attorneys Association chair Praveen Sham said in a statement that there was “general agreement that the current four-year LLB is not adequate. In meetings with law firms and members of the Bar, one assessment was uniformly received: the four-year undergraduate LLB does not adequately prepare students for the legal profession.”
This position was supported in discussions the Mail & Guardian had with large law firms, such as Webber Wentzel, which takes in 46 interns annually.
Angela Simpson, a partner in the corporate business unit at Webber Wentzel, said students were battling with basic numeracy and literacy skills.
“This is not just the fault of the degree it indicates problems at school level.”
Some senior lawyers echoed her view.
“In the last five to seven years there has definitely been a difference in the capabilities of candidates,” Simpson said.
“Many have problems with reading and expressing themselves well in written English or Afrikaans, which is essential for a lawyer, and they do not have maths literacy, which is essential for a number of areas of law, not just corporate law.”
She said students completing a postgraduate course would be more mature, which would also benefit them as interns.
Simpson said the students were not equipped to source legal material or solve problems. Wits, in its statement, raised concerns about training in ethics and writing.
“The needs of law firms have changed but graduates are not being trained in fields that are necessary. There is such a shortage of corporate lawyers, for example, and we are not getting lawyers with sufficient corporate knowledge.”
Ahmed Essop, chief executive of the Council for Higher Education, said in answer to questions from the M&G that the council had “convened a working group of higher education academic experts to draft a standard for the LLB”.
Road shows had been held and all interested parties were asked to make submissions by mid-November, which would then “be collated by the council and referred back to the working group for comment,” he said.
“A revised standards statement will then be made available for general comment before being presented to the council for approval.”
Essop said qualification standards would “not dictate the institutional curriculum design or the duration of the curriculum” but were intended to address fundamental questions: What is the purpose of the qualification (in the context in which is it awarded) and do the attributes of a graduate awarded that qualification adequately reflect and represent that purpose?
He went on to say: “The standard does not — and it’s not intended to — address the question of duration. That is a matter that needs to be addressed at institutional level, preferably in or after consultation with the relevant professional bodies.”
Deputy Minister of Justice and Constitutional Development John Jeffery said: “There are a number of competing issues at play here. The whole purpose of making the LLB a four-year degree was to make it easier for poorer, disadvantaged students to qualify.”
He said the South African Humanities Deans’ Association had indicated that only 25% of all students completed the four-year LLB in the minimum four years and most students took between five and seven years.
“There have also been a number of complaints from the legal sector, particularly from a pool of judges who feel that the level of lawyer coming before them is not acceptable.”
Legal academics have also complained about trying to teach students in a shorter time period.
Last year these concerns led to the formation of a national LLB task team comprising a number of legal bodies, such as the South African Law Deans’ Association, under the auspices of the Council on Higher Education.
Jeffery said he was interested to see the council’s draft standards to which the task team had contributed.
“We need to make sure there is a thorough discussion on the matter. I was interested to discover during a visit to Great Britain that the period spent doing a law degree after school is only three years,” he said.
“So is the problem of law students being unprepared [in South Africa] an indication that how they are being taught could be improved?”
Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng this week said that approaches to primary and secondary education might need to be reconsidered rather than adding a year.
Tax ombud and former Gauteng judge president Bernard Ngoepe said he had seen a decline in the skills of the lawyers coming before him — those who had qualified under the four-year degree.
Ngoepe said black students were more than capable of acquiring the postgraduate LLB degree.
“We should go back to the old genuine LLB, but at the same time bring back what was the then the BProc degree to enable those who do not have the funds to go for a post-graduate degree, to at least have a junior degree that will enable them to become attorneys.”