The past two editions of this column have been focused on the crisis in the Ugandan Judiciary.
Today, we deviate somewhat, to address another challenge that has arisen – the clear failure by the Law Development Centre (LDC) to absorb a large number of qualifying law graduates for the bar course. This is only a slight detour since, as we shall note below, the crisis of the judiciary is directly linked to, and in some ways arises from, the historical and contemporary deficiencies in the Ugandan system of legal education.
Last week, on Tuesday 20th August 2024 to be precise, LDC issued a statement in which it indicated that it had admitted a total of 1,260 applicants to the Post Graduate Diploma in Legal Practice for the academic year 2024/2025 across its various campuses (630 to Kampala, 420 to Mbarara and 210 Lira).
Together with some 240 students from previous intakes repeating various subjects, the total number intake for the academic year was stated to stand at 1,500. Of the 1,260 new students, 597 held offer letters issued last year (essentially ‘post-dated admissions’), while 663 were persons who had applied for admission in 2024 (‘fresh’ applicants).
In the statement, LDC struggled to demonstrate that it had been fair in the selection process, noting that a percentage of 28% had been applied across the board to all universities submitting candidates for admission to the Bar Course. I am not aware that there is any significant query regarding the fairness of the selection process, on the face of it.
Nonetheless, even going by LDC’s own communication, it is clear that 72% of applicants who applied to undertake the Bar Course, and who apparently qualified to do so under the law, were rejected for no other reason than the Centre’s lack of capacity to absorb them.
According to some indications, the exact number of students not admitted this year is 1,643 (evidently higher than the total intake, and about three times the number of fresh applicants). Indeed, in a further statement issued on Thursday 22nd August 2024, LDC Management observed that it had ‘admitted the maximum number of students on the basis of resources made available by government’.
Evidently, LDC is buckling (and might soon collapse altogether) under the impossible, impractical and unsustainable weight of its statutory mandate as the sole institution responsible for delivering the Bar Course in Uganda.
There are currently 14 universities accredited to teach law in Uganda. These are, in alphabetical order: Bishop Stuart University; Cavendish; Gulu; International University in East Africa; Islamic University in Uganda (Kabojja campus); Islamic University in Uganda (Kampala campus); Islamic University in Uganda (Kibuli campus); Kampala International University; King Ceasor University; Makerere; Nkumba; Uganda Christian University; Uganda Martyrs University and Uganda Pentecostal University.
An additional 3 universities will soon also be knocking on LDC’s door with law graduates, that is to say: Kabale; Ndejje and Victoria. The Irish poet WB Yeats might have been referring to LDC when in his 1919 poem, The Second Coming, he observed: ‘…the centre cannot hold’.
In fact, the Law Development Centre has been unable to hold for quite some time now, as evident from the practice of ‘deferred admissions’, which started in the academic year 2021/2022.
The 1,643 applicants not admitted this year (without even the option of the stop-gap measure of ‘deferred admissions’) have been left with no clear or visible path to careers as advocates. They are understandably sad, anxious and despondent. Indeed, some of them – to my knowledge – have even considered ending their lives.
It is a sad testament to the state of legal education in Uganda today, and my sympathies lie with all affected students, their parents and graduands, and dependents. Some of them are bread winners, who have dedicated family resources in the pursuit of legal education only to be so cruelly disappointed by a system not of their making. All of the affected law graduates clearly had a legitimate expectation that they would be admitted to the Bar Course if they qualified, an expectation which has been dashed without fault on their part.
However, they are not the only ones affected by this injustice. A significant part of the judicial crisis Uganda finds itself in relates to a fundamental disconnect between the law, on the one hand, and the society on the other. While the legal system asserts that ‘ignorance of the law is no defence’ the reality is that most Ugandans are in fact ignorant of the law which often works against them.
This was not always the case. There was a time when the gap between law and society within the communities which make up present-day Uganda was quite narrow – if it existed at all. Indeed, if one asked a Muganda in 1890 what the rules on succession, marriage, land or governance were in Buganda, one would receive an immediate (and correct) response. The people understood the law, because the law was organic and autochthonous, and therefore legitimate and authentic.
The colonial moment radically altered this reality as it did many other social, economic and political relations. Through the famous Kingdom Agreements (Buganda and Toro in 1900, and Ankole in 1901) as well as the 1902 Order-in-Council, the colonial State arrogated to itself the power to make law for the new trans-community political entity of ‘Uganda’ which was being put together – and also claimed for itself judicial power with respect to what were referred to as cases of a ‘mixed nature’, that is to say, those cases involving ‘natives’ from different ethnic communities.
The result was that the law of ‘Uganda’ would be a law not known to any of the communities which make up present day Uganda. From that moment, if one asked a Muganda what the laws on succession, marriage, land or governance were in ‘Uganda’, chances were that they would have absolutely no idea. How could they, indeed, when English and Indian Statutes (and English case law) were being invoked in the courts of law?
Essentially, courts became sites of terror and oppression for many Ugandans. The process of adjudication which had hitherto been a familiar and comfortable one (there is a Luganda word for Judge – ‘omulamuzi’ – as there is in several other indigenous languages) now became a terrifying one.
Africans had never quite needed any interlocutors in interacting with the laws with which they were familiar from childhood. Now they needed lawyers (and interpreters) to navigate the dense and frightening maze that was imposed colonial law.
And these were in very short supply. Under the 1904 Uganda Legal Practitioners Rules, for example, only the following persons were permitted to practise before Her Majesty’s High Court of Uganda: i) members of the Bar of England, Scotland or Ireland (barristers); ii) solicitors of the Supreme Court of England or Ireland, Writers to the Signet and Solicitors to the Supreme Courts in Scotland (solicitors); iii) ‘pleaders’ who had been admitted to practice before one of the High Courts in India; and iv) ‘native vakeels’ (who were only allowed to represent ‘natives’ at the discretion of the judge and upon such terms and conditions as he might think fit’).
It is indeed telling that while the word for ‘Judge’ is indigenous in many African languages, that for lawyers in Luganda (and many other languages) – ‘puliida’ – is not – being a variation on the term ‘Pleader’ introduced under the 1904 Rules. This process was accompanied by a deliberate process of denying university education – and legal education in particular – to Africans.
Those Africans who wished to become lawyers had to do so at great expense to themselves. They had to travel several miles, and pay significant expenses to afford the privilege (for indeed it was that) of a legal education. It was not accidental, therefore, that in 1961, one year to independence, out of approximately 150 lawyers practicing law in the Ugandan Protectorate, only 20 were African.
Indeed, legal education in Uganda, as in Kenya and Tanzania (and many other parts of Africa), would only become locally available after independence from Britain. Clearly, the history of law (as we know it today) and legal education in Uganda is not one of empowerment, inclusion and freedom but rather one of alienation, domination, exploitation, unjust enrichment and abuse of power.
Unfortunately, with only very few exceptions, this has remained the character of law – and legal education – in Uganda today. For a long time, legal education was a preserve of the very few people were lucky enough to make it initially to the University of Dar es Salaam and later to Makerere.
A step forward was taken with the advent of private universities, which allowed for private legal education beyond the confines of Makerere university. Even then, this was resisted within the legal community at the time (as evident from such litigation as the 2005 case of Pius Niwagaba and Others v Law Development Centre which compelled LDC to admit law students from the Uganda Pentecostal University).
Nonetheless, there is clear, even if slow, progress in terms of promoting access to legal education at the university level. A significant challenge in this movement is presented by LDC which has remained stuck in the context of its establishment in 1970 – when only one university in Uganda taught law, and access to legal education was the preserve of a privileged few.
In the Uganda of 2024, with 14 universities (and counting) producing law graduates, LDC is simply incapable (even if it were adequately funded by the government – which it is not) of meeting the needs of the current and growing number of qualified applicants for the Bar Course.
The LDC monopoly of training for the Bar Course is unsustainable and unrealistic, and must end. Indeed, no less a person than the current Director of LDC, Dr. Pamela Tibihikirra Kalyegira has reached this inescapable conclusion.
At page 87 of her 2010 book Liberalization of Legal Education in Uganda: Policy Considerations (itself based on her PhD thesis), she observes: ‘The question whether the Law Development Centre should surrender its monopoly over practical legal training is now more urgent than ever, given the growth in [the] number of law schools and subsequently the number of law graduates seeking admission for the bar course.
It is a mistake to restrict intake at the LDC as a way to harness limited LDC resources and the increasing number of law graduates. Uganda needs more lawyers, not fewer lawyers, and creating a bottleneck at the LDC is inefficient and unfair to qualified students who have invested in the law degree … The LDC [should] cease to exercise its function of conducting a year- long course to qualify candidates for the bar exam. The LDC [should] continue, however, in its appropriate function of setting and grading the bar exam.’
This makes sense. LDC should either give up the legal training component and restrict itself to conducting the bar exam, or it should continue legal training (alongside other private bar preparation institutions) with the bar exam being administered by a separate statutory entity.
Either way, the LDC monopoly should end. Fortunately, from their engagements on Twitter (formerly X), it is evident that the Attorney General, Hon. Kiryowa Kiwanuka, and other stakeholders similarly appreciate that the status quo cannot be maintained for much longer.
It is hoped that this appreciation can be urgently translated into the necessary legal and policy reform required to extricate LDC from the current mess in which it finds itself (including already instituted litigation, such as the judicial review application – Arthur Caleb Mugerwa and Others v Law Development Centre and Attorney General – filed on 22nd August 2024).
In the short term, however, it is critical that a mechanism be found to accommodate the 1,643 applicants unreasonably denied the legitimate expectation of admission to LDC for the 2024/2025 academic year, including studying in shifts and in a hybrid fashion (a combination of virtual and in-person classes).
At the same time, while ending the LDC monopoly is the necessary next step in the story of legal education in Uganda, it is certainly not – and cannot be – the last. Two great challenges, among others, will remain: i) democratizing and decolonizing (or indigenizing) the law; and ii) realizing a legal education aimed at producing socially conscious lawyers (and, by necessary implication, judicial officers).
We shall return to these and other systemic concerns as we continue to interrogate the nature of the Ugandan judicial crisis in the column next week.
The writer is senior lecturer and acting director of the Human Rights and Peace Centre (HURIPEC) at the School of Law, Makerere University, where he teaches Constitutional Law and Legal Philosophy.
