Article by: Mwiine Andrew
When I joined Law School, I became friends with one of the biggest legal minds yet to be discovered, and that was Niwagaba James by then the Attorney General of the Law Society. Among the many things he was excited about was becoming an advocate, and to achieve this, he had to go through the fire, yet satisfyingly consuming flames of the Law Development Centre. In his year, there were no Pre-Entry exams, but law and behold, the fire burnt in that place at least according to what he told me. Many like James are also looking forward to joining this highly prestigious yet very conspicuous Fountain of Honour, LDC. Unlike James and his colleagues, this time to enter the gates, yet another layer has been added, and that is the Pre-Entry Examination. Will this streamline quality entries or rid many of a dream?
Background.
The Bar Course Pre-Entry Exams were introduced by Prof. Fredrick Ssempebwa in 2010. He was at the time the Chairperson of the Committee on Legal Education and Training at the Law Council. The Law Development Centre, acting under the Law Development Centre Act, Cap 132, introduced its own Pre-Entry in the same year, justified as a regulatory measure to uphold the professional competence of advocates. It then became mandatory for all law graduates from local and foreign universities to sit a Pre-Entry Exam at the bar course to prove they are worthy of the LDC mountain.
A pre-entry examination is an assessment administered before someone is admitted to a program or institution. It’s designed to evaluate a candidate’s knowledge, skills, and abilities to ensure they are suitable for the program.
The Law Council scrapped the pre-entry exams for the bar course at the Law Development Centre (LDC) in 2019. This opened a floodgate for lawyers across the country to join the bar course. In the 2024/25 intake, over 4,000 applications were received, forcing the institution to have two intakes, that is, September 2024 and January 2025, who are currently sitting their final exams.
Previously, the tight pre-entry examinations had left many wallowing in pity with especially politicians, and Members of Parliament, attacking and blaming Law Council for their failure to join the bar course because of their regulatory power under Section 6 of the Advocates Act, Cap 295 which gives Law Council power to regulate legal training and determine qualifications for the Bar Course.
Leading to the scrapping of the Pre Entry Exams at the Bar Course, the West Budama MP and now Minister of Security, Jacob Oboth Oboth, had planned to table a bill before parliament to amend Section 8 of Cap 295, among others was to stop Pre Entry Exams at the Bar Course. He argued that the practice was more commercial than Academic. This argument propounds that what started as a noble idea to preserve quality and guard the sacrosanct realm of legal professionalism evolved into a bureaucratic hive which, according to the current ULS President, Mr. Isaac Ssemakadde Kimeze, is intended to feed off students’ anxiety and facilitate socioeconomic exclusion. Hon. Oboth Oboth, then the chairperson of the Legal and Parliamentary Affairs, noted that LDC had its mechanisms to select the students for admission and that Pre-Entry examinations were simply a disservice to Ugandans who had already passed their four-year training at university. He further noted that the Law Council carries out monitoring and evaluation on the curriculum and approves it to be administered by the universities. It cannot, therefore, turn around and say the universities did not train the students well, and the students are punished by the Pre-Entry examinations.
Article 30 of the 1995 Constitution of Uganda provides for A Right to Education, asserting that all persons have a right to education, and this right is also provided for under international statutes, including the International Convention on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) under Articles 13 & 14. The social dimension requires states to make various forms of education available and easily accessible to all and to introduce progressively several forms of free education. Now this is because education is both a human right in itself and an indispensable means of realizing other human rights. According to A.P.M. Coomans in his writings, he propounds the Right to Education Matrix, which has two binary fusions that include the elements of the right to education and levels of state obligation. He avers that the elements of this right are two, the social dimension (Accessibility, Availability) and the freedom dimension (freedom to choose, freedom to establish), and then under the levels of state obligation, he asserts three levels, that is, Respect. Protect and fulfill.
Now we should note that the international sphere has set out inter alia, possible violations of the Right to Education occurring through the direct action of state parties. These may be acts of commission or through their failure to take the steps required for the realization of the right, or even omissions. By way of illustration, violations could include: the introduction or failure to repeal discriminatory legislation in the field of Education, the failure to introduce free primary education, the prohibition of private educational institutions, the denial of academic freedom of staff and students, and the closure of educational institutions in times of political tension.
Article 21 of the 1995 Constitution, on the other hand, provides equality before and under the law in all spheres of political, economic, social, and cultural life and every other respect and shall enjoy equal protection of the law. This read in tandem with Article 30, you will realize that every person should have equal standing in accessing education regardless of their social standing, and will move you to think carefully whether the multi-layered pre-entry model is legally justifiable in the sphere of inherent, unalienable, and inviolable rights of an individual.
In 2024, the Law Development Center (LDC) Director, Dr. Pamela Tibihikirra-Kalyegira, called for the mandatory reintroduction of pre-entry exams as a pre-qualification for any candidate to join any law school in Uganda. Dr Pamela having served in various capacities including Dean, Faculty of Law at Uganda Christian University, Director Quality Assurance and Accreditation at the National Council for Higher Education, and Chairperson of Uganda Law Reform Commission, among others, averred that the mandatory pre-entry exam at LDC comes too late because any candidate with just a minimum of two principal passes can qualify to study law at the undergraduate level, which contributes to the compromised quality of law school graduates before they head to LDC to obtain a diploma in legal practice. To her, two principal passes are below the minimum for someone who, on top of the two years of Advanced Certificate, adds four years of toil and tussle to reach the gates of LDC without being subjected to another layer of determining their capacity to handle practice by sitting a pre-entry examination.
“However, if we think there is value in having this place called LDC, where we go to train our future lawyers, and which so many jurisdictions have come to benchmark, then we have to also control what’s happening on the other side, which is the law schools. Because the numbers are not generated by LDC, they’re on the receiving end. Right now, the law schools are taking in anyone, and perhaps as a profession, we need to go back and ask ourselves, how come medicine, engineering, and architecture are not taking anyone, but for us we are happy to have any sort of person coming into law school,” she added.
The Law Council, under its mandate in the Advocates Act, announced the reinstatement of Pre-Entry Examinations for admission into the LDC beginning with the 2025/26 academic year. This is a temporary measure transitioning the law academia to rolling out the National Bar Course in 2027/28, which aims at tightening entry standards and restoring academic rigor in Uganda’s legal training system.
The question left at the back of our minds is, does the Law Council in all its might think that a multi-layered pre-entry setting at undergraduate, LDC, and even at master’s level conforms to the legal standards, and also whether it is well thought out? It’s a recommendation that regulation should be tightened at the undergraduate level, such that the entry at university level becomes the sieving point to purify the legal system of any chaff that may not be standardized for the course. This way we eliminate duplication and continued reassessment of individuals, which is tedious and very time-consuming, not to mention expensive.
We further should note that parliament which is the superior law-making organ of the 3 arms of government under Article 79 of the 1995 Constitution adopted the report of the Legal and Parliamentary Committee which among others recommended for the halting of th