No longer at ease: The continuing relevance of the Ssemakadde revolution in Uganda Law Society

I start with two apologies. First, last week, in the absence of the Dean and Deputy Dean of the School of Law, I had to dedicate substantial time holding fort in both instances – which allowed me an even greater appreciation of the burden that administrators shoulder (alongside teaching and other responsibilities).

In the event, I was ultimately unable to write this column. Secondly, this week I should have – as promised – continued outlining the contours of the juridical ghost conjured by the Constitutional Court of Uganda in its decision in the case of Innocent Ngobi Ndiko and Others v Attorney General and Another (Constitutional Petition No.23 of 2020).

However, this week is an eventful one in the Uganda Law Society, as meetings (and counter-meetings) are held to decide its leadership after 27th September 2025 (when the mandate of the current Executive Council technically ends) – and I thought it would be an opportune time to reflect on this moment.

My reflections go back to five years ago, when I had the privilege of addressing the Ugandan Judiciary, on the occasion of the 3rd Benedicto Kiwanuka Memorial Lecture. It was a special honour, given that the two previous keynote speakers had been Chief Justice Samuel William Wako Wambuzi, the three-time Chief Justice of Uganda, and Chief Justice Willy Mutunga, Chief Justice Emeritus of Kenya.

In that presentation titled – ‘Black Laws Matter’ – I tried to make a case for the importance of decolonizing (alongside democratizing) not only the Ugandan legal system but also the Ugandan legal profession.

It was not a message I had suggested for the first time. Long before that, as Guild President of the Law Development Centre, at the final dinner for Bar Course students held around July 2006, I had suggested the same – on that occasion emphasizing the importance of crafting a legal profession which recognized, and was responsive to, the struggles of ordinary Ugandans.

I recall that, after that speech, one of the Lecturers passed by my table and asked: ‘Kabumba, you want to be poor?’. I did not then, nor do I now, wish poverty for myself, those close to me or indeed, any other human being. Poverty has the special character of denying human beings their dignity.

Indeed, in a previous column – ‘The story of Ijuka Kabumba’ (published on 20th December 2023) – I described the humble circumstances in which my father was born, the valiant struggle he undertook to overcome that difficult beginning, and the lessons he carried from that into his public service and personal ethos.

One of the things he taught me was the dignity of all labour – the importance of respecting every person who attempted to do an honest day’s work, whatever that work was. To this day, I make it a point to greet, with the utmost respect, persons engaged in manual labour in the full knowledge that quite often, the janitor in their overalls is often more dignified and more honourable than the bewigged Judge.

Unfortunately, the legal profession I joined was not one which reflected these ideas. The word on the street as ‘fake it until you make it’, with young lawyers being encouraged to buy Mercedes Benzes, wear flashy suits and live deceptively opulent lives (inevitably hinged on unsustainable credit).

This game was so well-known that a certain car – the Benz C200 – came to be known by car dealers as ‘ki lawyer’. It was then, and is now, of course, rather gauche. In fact, many Ugandan lawyers were, and are, one unexpected health crisis away from poverty.

We are, really, peasants in suits – operating in a boda boda economy and with a larger duty to ourselves, society and the State to find a way of contributing real value to our country rather than being parasitic upon it.

It was, and remains, a depressing state of affairs. Indeed, for a long time, I had stopped attending Uganda Law Society events. It was difficult to stand the small talk, centred around ‘deals’, money, cars and vacation spots. It was boring to sit through ‘Annual Law Conferences’ which mainly described law as a ‘business’ with questions of governance relegated to one ‘Rule of Law’ week tucked away towards the close of the year.

This is the (rather long) background which informed my support for Isaac Ssemakadde’s 2024 campaign for the Uganda Law Society Presidency. He was a true breath of fresh air – a Ugandan advocate who understood the need for an ideological (indeed a foundational, structural and philosophical) realignment of the law and legal profession.

Hitherto, this understanding seemed to be restricted to some sections of the Ugandan legal academy, and an even more limited section of the Ugandan judiciary (rare glimpses of this being Judge Patrick Tabaro’s views in Salvatori Abuki v Attorney General, Judge Frederick Egonda-Ntende’s classic exposition in Osotraco v Attorney General and Justice Kenneth Kakuru’s description of the ‘reasonable Ugandan’ in Male Mabirizi v Attorney General).

Ssemakadde distilled his campaign messages into four pillars: democratization, demilitarization, decolonization and digital transformation. I was instinctively drawn to the first three of these.

While I recognize the importance of the fourth, I must confess to being an increasingly tech-phobic middle- aged Ugandan man who is already becoming a fossil or dinosaur (one of the reasons I am looking forward to retirement from Makerere University a few years from now, to make room for younger and more vibrant scholars who can better relate to an ever-younger student population).

For me, any one of the first three ‘Ds’ would, in itself, have been a sufficient platform for a truly transformative ULS Presidency – that they were combined, with the fourth ‘D’ added – was only a bonus. I was glad when the overwhelming majority of Ugandan lawyers recognized the moment for what it was, and chose Ssemakadde to lead the Ugandan Law Society.

We are now at another moment when we must decide whether to extend this mandate or not. I certainly think that it is extremely important that that mandate be extended for another year, for the reasons briefly outlined below. In the first place, Ssemakadde’s first year as Uganda Law Society President was unduly interrupted and sabotaged by lawfare waged by certain sections of the Ugandan legal fraternity. This was only to be expected.

However, it took a decidedly dark turn when his liberty was threatened, forcing him into exile. Since that time, he has been forced to conduct the business of the Uganda Law Society from outside Uganda – an irony in itself, and a loud commentary on the state of human rights in Uganda.

In spite of this, the ‘Radical New Bar’ (RNB) has been able to conduct an impressive set of activities – a testament not only to the resilience (and efficiency) of the technical ULS Staff both in Kampala and throughout the ULS Executive led by the Vice President Anthony Asiimwe. I guess, in this sense, the fourth pillar of the RNB self-defined mandate – Digital Transformation – has proven especially prescient, and relevant.

Nonetheless, there might certainly have been a greater impact if Ssemakadde had been allowed to serve out his first term unhindered, which itself makes the case for an additional year to realize the RNB’s aspirations.

Secondly, and related to the first, is what it would mean if Ssemakadde were to be unceremoniously denied what has come to be the traditional second term. It would be to send a message to those responsible for Ssemakadde’s exile that the stratagem – of isolating perceived ‘trouble-makers’ was one which was efficacious.

And once this position was established, there would be no end to its victims. This, for me, is the much more important reason for the membership of the Uganda Law Society to rally behind, and support, a second term for the RNB President.

It is bad enough that as Ugandans generally and lawyers in particular, we looked on as Ivan Ssebadduka was jailed for three years by the Supreme Court of Uganda for ‘abusing them’ (he referred to the esteemed bench as a ‘council of fools, and openly pondered as to whether certain of their decisions had been reached under the influence of drugs or alcohol).

Then we looked on as Male Mabirizi was jailed for 18 months for similarly ‘colourful’ speech. We are again looking on as Isaac Ssemakadde is punished for (admittedly unpalatable) speech.

Let us make no mistake – the precedents being established will one day be used against the rest of us. For avoidance of all doubt, to defend the right to speech is not to endorse the contents thereof. I certainly do not think, for instance, that the Justices of the Supreme Court operate under the influence of alcohol or drugs, or that they are a ‘council of fools’. Nor do I agree with the language by Male Mabirizi or Isaac Ssemakadde.

At the same time, we must distinguish between vulgar vituperation, on the one hand and actual criminality (such as speech intended to incite harm against a particular person or group of persons).

While some might celebrate the ‘punishment’ of these ‘meddlesome persons’ we must have the moral clarity of recognizing that human rights and freedoms (including the freedom of speech) are the most relevant when enjoyed by persons we might disagree with, or whose views we might find distasteful or disquieting. In this same vein it bears reiterating (as we did a year ago) that Ssemakadde is not perfect.

Indeed, his leadership of the ULS has certainly not been blameless – as evident in his handling of Eron Kiiza’s detention (including his reported advice to him), the problematic treatment of ‘the twins’, and even the ideological contradictions evident in the ‘Bang the Benz’ campaign (among many others).

At the same time, we now live in a decidedly abnormal country – one in which the word ‘drone’ has come to mean not an aerial device but a motor vehicle used to abduct and disappear citizens; in which ‘learning Runyankore’ means to be tortured; and in which Judges seem to be falling over themselves to create ‘precedents’ which make a mockery of the right to liberty under Article 23, the right to freedom of speech under Article 29, and indeed whole Chapters of the Constitution (on the independence of the judiciary, the protection of human rights and so on).

It is a time in which increasingly the notion of exile is not an oblique word we heard from our parents with reference to the ‘1970s’ and ‘1980s’ – but is the lived reality of people we know – colleagues and friends like Stellah Nyanzi, Kakwenza Rukirabashaija and now even Isaac Ssemakadde.

Indeed, it is a fate being experienced by a person with a seat on the Supreme Court – Justice Prof Dr Esther Mayambala Kisaakye. In these dire circumstances, those who would want to see a return to some semblance of normalcy should exercise some element of strategic thinking.

In this strange moment, is it strategically wise to discard all flawed heros? I suspect that this might be an instance in which we learn from Yoweri Museveni, who has demonstrated an ability to work with persons he once disagreed with (or even fought against) in the pursuit of particular ends: Moses Ali, Aggrey Awori, Nobert Mao, Chris Rwakasisi and others.

One does not have to necessarily like, wholly agree with or even completely trust Isaac Ssemakadde to recognize that he now represents something larger than himself – the symbol of resistance against the weaponization of the law by dominant forces – and to calculate that, more may be gained in supporting his leadership for an extra year, than in abandoning him to the wolves at this particular moment.

Thirdly, and related to the first two considerations above, we should not countenance the cynical manipulations of law – in which courts can decide when Ugandan lawyers can meet and speak – which have been a feature of the first RNB year.

The idea that a court could feel entitled to stop a meeting of the Uganda Law Society (even that convened to elect ULS representatives to the Judicial Service Commission) was to flirt with judicial impunity and overreach.

That overreach was only compounded by the unwillingness or failure on the part of the judiciary to treat efforts to review those orders with any urgency. For some sections of the Uganda Law Society (the very ones which so cynically weaponized the courts and the law) to then turn around, towards the end of the RNB term, and demand an urgent meeting of the Uganda Law Society for the sole purpose of putting the final nail in the coffin of the ULS President is, for lack of an appropriate English word – kajoogo (the closest translation, perhaps, is ‘impudence’).

Indeed, even for this reason alone, I would personally have supported a stalemate, in which the current Uganda Law Society leadership were frozen for a somewhat indefinite period, if only as a message to those sections of the ULS who, acting in concert with sections of the Judiciary, displayed so low a regard for the autonomy and self-determination of Ugandan lawyers.

However, this would not be in keeping with the very ethos of the ULS – not to mention the stated aims of the RNB – as to democratization. It is for these reasons (among many others whose full articulation space does not allow) that I continue to strongly support Isaac Ssemakadde’s efforts to disrupt ‘business- as-usual’ at the Uganda Law Society and the Ugandan legal profession (including the Ugandan Judiciary).

I am glad, for the first time in a very long while, to be a member of a Uganda Law Society in which a concern for human rights, good governance and the rule of law are not just matters which are relegated to a random week in a crowded calendar but have been so foregrounded that some sections of the ULS now decry the emphasis on ‘politics’ at the expense of ‘business’.

If this is the ‘crisis’ of the Uganda Law Society – it was a much-needed crisis, one which I have personally waited for since 2006. In the column next week, we shall continue to identify the faces of the ghost of Innocent Ngobi Ndiko, itself a manifestation of the real crisis in constitutional adjudication in Uganda