Dr Tibihikirra unveils plan to transform LDC

I grew up in Entebbe. I was a child of two civil servants, so I grew up with a very strong sense of citizenship and service to the country. That has shaped my career in terms of where I’ve put my effort. So, while I started at Uganda Christian University, a private entity, I ended up in government, which I have served for the last 10 years.

How do you intend to clean up the image of LDC in the public eye?

LDC does have several challenges. They are not unique to LDC. So if you go to any higher education institution, you’re going to find these sorts of challenges. You’re dealing with students who have been prepared from all sorts of backgrounds. There’s no uniform standard in terms of quality.

Now we have 14 law schools that apply to the Law Development Centre, all at different levels of preparation for their students. When their students come here, sometimes the high failure rates, for example, are attributed to internal problems, which may or may not be true. So you hear of a high failure rate because people are corrupt and want to take money from students to change their marks or cause their marks to go missing so that they have to pay. You have all those sorts of allegations.

Some may be true, some may not be. But as someone who is committed to ensuring quality, I intend to review our policies and our internal policies. For example, we are looking at how to strengthen internal controls as far as examination malpractice is concerned because it relates to both staff and students.

We’re also reviewing our sexual harassment policy to ensure that everybody is well taken care of in terms of the students as well as the staff. It is my commitment that any allegations of examination malpractice or sexual harassment will be investigated to the fullest extent possible and the culprits will be brought to book. 

Is the Bar course too hard to justify the high failure rate?

The high failure rate at LDC is a multifaceted issue in the sense that the course is not easy. I did the Bar Course in 1995. Not all of us passed, but we were a very small class size, we were 50. And at that time, we were residents here. The government paid for our accommodation, and meals, gave us pocket money, and a book allowance. Now you have a student who has to fund their accommodation and their tuition, others are mothers, among others. So the type of student now coming to LDC is no longer your typical student whose average age is 22 or 23. Some of them have responsibilities, which will create a lot of pressure.

Now you have to remember that the LDC is after four years of law school. You expect it to be done within nine months. You’re supposed to do all the practical aspects of the four years of theory you’ve covered at university. So indeed it’s pressurized. 

Secondly, there is no medium for measuring the quality of preparation of the students admitted to the Bar Course today. So previously, like in my time, we were only at one law school, Makerere University. So there was standardisation in terms of preparation. Now we have around 14 law schools; anybody can go to law school. So we are having students prepared at different levels, and that affects the ability to pass the bar course. 

Should pre-entry exams be reinstated to the Bar Course?

That is a discussion that needs to be held as a profession. There are two schools of thought on pre-entry at LDC; one is that we need it because the numbers have become too many to handle. LDC can no longer ensure quality; that is a fact.

The other school of thought is that pre-entry should be at law school and I belong to that school of thought. I think it is not fair that people should study for four years, and then you erect a barrier stopping them. People have sold their cows, and land to send their children to school, and then you say, now, here is another barrier that you have to pass to practice.

I started Law pre-entry tests in Uganda while at Uganda Christian University with a colleague who was from the US while benchmarking the Law School Admissions Test (LSAT) which is administered by the American Bar Association called, the Law School Admissions Council, and its essence is that students are admitted according to their performance of the LSAT. So it’s one central body running the LSAT. So you will have the top law schools take the higher grades and then that way.

So as a professional, we need to have this conversation. 

Should the teaching of the Bar Course be liberalised?

We need to ask ourselves whether we can carry on with LDC in its current structure. This is because you’re either going to have lawyers in one place or you train them and you ensure standardisation or you say, let’s find out as we have done at LDC and decentralize, decongest the campus. 

But the problem with standardisation is; is what we are giving at Kampala Campus the same as what’s in Mbarara or Lira? Certainly not. If you look at the type of lawyers (tutors) that we’re able to attract to teach, there are hardly any advocates in Lira. So we have to ask ourselves the question, does Uganda have enough money to set up quality campuses that are replicas of LDC?

Or do we now need to move, as other countries have done, where LDC is an examination centre? Those are conversations we need to have as a profession because the current setup is not working, and that is why you find complaints within the profession. 

You’re turning out more than 1,000 lawyers each year and the quality has gone down. So with this very school of thought, you say that is fine, the government should take the way of giving liberty to other institutions to teach the bar course, but then have a standard.

The other school of thought says, no, you have seen what has happened in liberalisation when we opened up to many universities and whatever, quality has gone down. No, this is the last stop. You must have only LDC controlling the quality. 

But you can only argue that if you’re prepared to invest money into it, for example, fund those regional campuses, or say, if the ongoing construction project at Kampala Campus is complete, it should be able to take 2,000 students. So perhaps we would say: forget about the regional campuses, let us have one place where we train these lawyers. It is in the centre, you have access to courts, good libraries, and top practitioners among others. We can agree to have this one place where we can standardize and ensure quality. But that has been related to the question of how many advocates Uganda needs. How many advocates do we need? How many do we need to produce per year? If we can produce 2,000 here at LDC, would we need more than 2,000 advocates per year?

So the National Planning Authority needs to tell us because they have the human resource development aspect in all their planning. 

The Bar Course is expensive. Would you consider revision of the fees?

In Uganda, we’re not charging the unit cost. When we talk about the unit cost of education, Uganda charges what it should cost. For example, we charged Shs6m for the Bar Course, however, it costs more than Shs12m to train one student; when you look at all the inputs, resources, lecturers, and that sort of thing. The government is subsidising this cost for each student that we train. We get funding from the government for example to pay salaries, utilities among others. Now as Ugandans, you know if you talk about raising the fees, people get agitated. So we’re still at that level where we cannot charge the unit cost. But as much as possible, we try to let students pay, for example, timely, so they don’t have to pay the entire Bar Course fees at once.

What is your message to the staff and students?

LDC is a special journey that is celebrated by wearing a crown. So you must earn it and we (the staff), should help our students to earn it and to earn that quality that is distinguishable. I would like to see an LDC that has managed to move the needle back to that position where it is seen as a quality institution that releases quality graduates that we will all be proud of.

Any assurance to the public?

I know there have been some real concerns about malpractice and sexual harassment, and I want the public to know that I’m committed to fighting this vice. But you know, we’re a reflection of society. So LDC does not attract only good people. But we need to have a zero tolerance. Now, I would like the public and the students to help us to do the right thing.

The questions. “ We need to ask ourselves whether we can carry on with LDC in its current structure. This is because you’re either going to have lawyers in one place or you train them and you ensure standardisation or you say, let’s find out as we have done at LDC and decentralize, decongest the campus. But the problem with standardisation is; is what we are giving at Kampala Campus the same as what’s in Mbarara or Lira? Certainly not...,” Dr Pamela Tibihikirra-Kalyegira 

Her education

Dr Tibihikirra-Kalyegira holds a Bachelor of Laws degree from Makerere University, a Diploma in Legal Practice from the Law Development Centre, a Master of Laws in Public International Law (with Merit) from the London School of Economics and a Doctorate in Judicial Science from Indiana University Maurer School of Law.

She was also a Fulbright Scholar during her studies at Indiana University. In 1999, she was enrolled as an advocate of the High Court of Uganda.