• According to him, the judge recognized the power of the school to regulate the behaviour of its students
• He is urging people to read the full judgement before passing commentary on the issue
Professor Kwaku Asare, a US-based Ghanaian lawyer and accountant has questioned the soundness of arguments being advanced by some persons on the ruling by the Accra High Court in the case involving Achimota School and the two Rastafarian students.
Most reactions to the ruling have been on the assumption that the judge has opened the floodgates for students to wear all kinds of hairstyles and conduct themselves anyhow in schools in the name of religion.
One of the persons with such notion is Angel Carbonu, the President of the National Association of Graduate Teachers.
Angel Carbonu said, “What the judgement means is that the Rasta students and all other students can dress anyway and go to school, and we teachers do not have to waste our time and energy talking about character formation. We thank the court for making our work easy.
“Someone wears Rasta, you should also be able to wear your cap or hat. We really do not care about that in any way. We do not care about character formation because our professional understanding of character formation has been truncated by a court ruling and you want us to care. We are going to obey the court ruling,” he said.
But Kwaku Azar as he is widely known said on JoyNews that people with that kind of thought are spewing ignorance.
He said that their pedestrian argument is not rooted in any law as the judge in her ruling recognized the fact that Achimota School has the legitimacy to regulate the behaviour of its students.
“We are not the first country that a court has held that people cannot be denied education based on their religion, specifically grooming which if you read the judgement has its roots in the bible. The parade of horribles that you read on social media are just social media talk. They have no basis as an empirical matter or even as a logical matter.”
Kwaku Azar also hit out at the lawyers for Achimota for not addressing some of the pertinent issues the judge raised during the hearing.
“When you look at this specific issue of grooming Achimota has. The judge asked the question what is the specific objective of that. What is that for? Achimota could not give a convincing answer. They kept throwing things like discipline and academic achievement and so on but they were never able to demonstrate that merely because of the style of your hair, you are likely to trigger indiscipline or the learning environment is going to be negatively affected. They couldn’t answer that question because there is no answer. We on social media were surprised that the Attorney General was defending this.”
Watch the reaction of father of one of the Rastafarian students, Oheneba, speak after the court's verdict on GhanaWeb #SayItLoud
Professor Kwaku Asare is a US-based Ghanaian lawyer and accountant