Why I Was Wrong About The Law Development Centre

By Mwanje Gideon Former President, Uganda Law Students Association (ULSA)

I have come to realize exactly why Uganda needs the Law Development Centre (LDC) so badly to protect and regulate its legal system. I am not speaking out of bias, and I know my words may hurt some of the people who have mentored me and who do not agree with this school of thought. I have read and understood prominent writings from legal scholars whom I hold in high regard, including the President of the Uganda Law Society.

He is quite an intelligent man with a valid opinion, but it is an opinion I must now respectfully disagree with based on my own chronological journey through Uganda’s legal education system. Dr. Martin Luther King reminds us that there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must take it because his conscience tells him it is right.

Before I graduated from Nkumba University, I served as the President of the Uganda Law Students Association (ULSA). At that time, our association united the 14 accredited law schools in Uganda, including Makerere University, Nkumba University, UCU (2 campuses), IUIU (3 campuses), KIU, BSU, and KCU, among others.

My executive committee featured six presidents from these schools, while the rest served as ex-officials contributing to our governance. During my tenure, I had the privilege of visiting almost every law school in the country. I appreciated the wellbeing of the students and interacted casually with passionate lecturers and university deans, many of whom became my friends.

Immersed in that university bubble, I was among the loud chorus of people who strongly believed LDC was a colonial mechanism that had lost its importance. Having read various scholars explaining why LDC was started in the early 1970s, I genuinely thought the institution was useless and served no purpose in our modern legal era.

I have come to realize I was so wrong. After performing well at the undergraduate level and passing the pre-entry exams, I enrolled at LDC. I have so far spent five months at the Centre, and each passing day introduces me to new areas of practice I had not even considered before. With all due respect to the 19 law schools currently accredited to offer law in Uganda, I will bethe first to admit that no university can replace the quality of education LDC imparts to a student—whether it is Makerere, a well-funded public university, or any other reputable private institution.

It is true that universities have the money, the resources, and the facilities. But do they have the quality? Will they have the best government personnel and strict adherence to uniform standards? Will they subject learners to the thick, hardened system necessary to enable them to operate under a highly pressurized practice environment?

They may have resources, but they simply do not have what it takes to groom a practicing advocate. Mr. Paul Mukiibi told me one day: “If you want to be among them, then do what it takes to be among them.” Yes, I admit LDC operates under a tough system that sometimes makes you weary, but actual legal practice does not hand out berries. It follows the exact same principle. I have had the benefit of speaking to over 80,000 Secondary school students in the last two years from about 145 schools across the country on their Careers day and out of a sample of 100 students, 60 students always want to do law, and are eager to know how much a lawyer earns.

The questions of the day are: where is the problem ? Why are the numbers so high ? Why are these numbers in only the Legal profession not any other profession ? Did the Pre-entries help or made the situation worse? We may not address the mischief if we hurry to establish the National Legal Examination Centre. The National Legal Examination Centre Bill I have recently spent time looking through the proposed National Legal Examination Centre Bill, and I can confess this: the Government is making a fatal mistake if they proceed to abolish LDC. This is a looming threat.

The country needs LDC like how a baby needs a mother; the country needs LDC like how a patient needs a doctor. If the government abolishes centralized training and shifts to a model where students merely sit for a decentralized bar exam, we will face severe legal training dangers: The abolition of LDC will lead to Erosion of Practical Skills, Universities teach the law, but LDC teaches the practice of the law. An examination center cannot test the daily, monitored grooming of courtroom decorum and trial advocacy.

It will lead to Massive Inequality in Preparation, allowing 19 different universities with vastly different budgets and faculty capabilities to prepare students for a single exam will create unbridgeable gaps in candidate readiness. Most importantly, there will be Market Flooding in the legal system. Without the rigorous, centralized conditioning of LDC, we risk flooding the market with theoretically sound butpractically incompetent lawyers. It is easier to read for an exam in days and pass than going through a one year course training.

The latter grooms a real Advocate that will provide solutions, not the one who will have a good memory of cases and the law. A compelling reason for Uganda to maintain LDC as a centralized regulatory body is the preservation of uniform standards in professional legal ethics and practical advocacy. If legal training is fragmented across multiple private or public institutions, the state risks creating a “race to the bottom,” where competing institutions might lower internal training standards to attract enrollment, relying solely on a final Bar exam to do the filtering is first degree murder on the legal education system.

The Government’s primary fear seems to be the overwhelming number of students. However, I am certain that the pre-entry exams subjected to the new cohort will yield good fruits, naturally filtering candidates so that the Centre can effectively manage the numbers. The Government ought to give this pre-entry system time and see how effective it is! It is important to note that removing the monopoly and allowing multiple private or decentralized institutions to teach the Bar Course invites a free-for-all system.

In a bid to compete for student tuition, independent schools may dilute internal training standards and lower day-to-day requirements. I submit that keeping a centralized training ground ensures that every single advocate in the country is subjected to the exact same rigorous, peer-reviewed ethical standards, practical clerkships, and intensive oral advocacy drills before they ever step into a real courtroom to represent the public.

Lessons from Ghana We do not have to guess what happens when a country abolishes its centralized bar school in favor of mass examinations; we only need to look at our peers on the continent. No university is ready to provide services like LDC, and the crisis in West Africa proves it. Ghana recently abolished strict centralized training in favor of liberalized “Exam-Only” access. After sixty six years of the Ghana School of law.

1. A. Sarpong noted on situations within Law Schools in Ghana “the situation in some of these [LL.B awarding] institutions is unsatisfactory: low entry requirements, crowded lecture halls, low lecturer student/ratio, absence or poor Library facilities, students combining professional careers with attendance at lectures, and poor quality of teaching, inter alia.

Indeed, it is not uncommon to find some lecturers absenting themselves from lectures only to emerge at the tail end of the semester to provide students areas to concentrate on for examination purposes. Per G. A. Sarpong, “Reflections on Professional Legal Education in Ghana: An Essay in Honour of Bernard JOAA DA Rocha (2019)”, page 8. Furthermore, Ghana did not wake up yesterday to enact such law.

The public outcry in Ghana reached a boiling point in 2019 when only 128 out of 1,820 candidates passed the Ghana School of Law entrance exam. This sparked massive street protests by the National Association of Law Students (NALS)under the campaign #OpenUpLegalEducation, which formally shifted the conversation from a student grievance to a national policy debate, and in 2021 Parliament embarked on the process of drafting and debating.

In Uganda, just after the 2024/2025 intake which left out many students, it has made it possible for us to have this law already in a bill form by 2026 even when pre-entries have been established, funny! In conclusion, the immediate abolition of LDC would be a catastrophe to the legal profession. I was once its biggest critic, but my time inside its walls has shown me the undeniable truth.

It is very important to reform the legal sector, but destroying the institution that has nurtured it for decades in just one year of debate is a wrong move that needed serious consideration. LDC has been a guard to the gate of legal excellence in our country and its abolition is a mistake Uganda cannot afford to make. For God and my country! The author is a legal scholar at the Law Development Centre Kampala. (For comments on this story, get back to us on 0705579994 [WhatsApp line], 0779411734 & 041 4674611 or email us at mulengeranews@gmail.com).