Prime
More justice, fewer justices
Author: Phillip Matogo. PHOTO/FILE
What you need to know:
- Accordingly, the government’s focus should not be on regime preservation at the expense of law and morality.
- Instead, it should accept limits on it size and longevity by preparing for a transition to post-Museveni rule
It was reported by this newspaper this week that several Members of Parliament rejected the move by government to beef up the Supreme Court with 21 justices and the Court of Appeal with 55 justices.
Last week, on Wednesday, minister of Justice and Constitutional Affairs Norbert Mao tabled the Judicature (Amendment) Bill, 2023, seeking to increase the number of justices on both the Supreme Court and the Court of Appeal.
At variance with this plan, Abdu Katuntu (MP for Bugweri County) reportedly rejected proposals by the Judiciary, Law Development Centre and Uganda Law Reform Commission buttressing the proposal contained in the Bill while appearing before the Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Committee.
“You are telling us to create a bill of $10m (Shs38b) annually; that is in the medium term. Oh dear, the taxpayer deserves better. Judges should be doing their job, they should be more efficient and more effective…instead, we are allocating the meagre resources in areas where we think we can work differently and we achieve the same results,” Katuntu said, according to Nile Post.
Allied to this, America’s second president, John Adams, famously called a republic “a government of laws, not of men”. He was quoting James Harrington, an English political theorist of classical republicanism.
The purport here is that men subject a country to their private interests. They are thus not concerned with right, but with power.
Conversely, laws are impersonal and largely reflect the ideal of what we associate with what is right.
In other words, more justices means more power seekers, while better laws place the supremacy of due process above the whims of a few.
This should thus be the focus of government, namely improving the statute books with the articulate value of justice. True, justice is a coat of many colours. However let’s peer further, shall we.
Harrington’s metaphor of two girls cutting a cake, one cuts and the other chooses, makes for a fair depiction of the principle of a separation of powers.
This is a principle which has been under assault continually by this government. And now, one suspects, government is prosecuting its latest attack on a separation of powers by appointing a host of justices who will owe their allegiance to the appointing authority instead of the country at large.
By this token, government is cutting the cake and choosing which pieces it will gobble up. This controverts justice, no less.
That said, even laws should not, in and of themselves, be viewed as the singular guarantors of justice.
For we have seen laws being bent towards injustice.
Apartheid (Afrikaans for apartness) was a system of laws which legalised racial segregation in South Africa between 1948 and 1990.
Certainly, this must be shocking to those unborn when it was on the South African statue books, defined by a pigmentocracy of a White minority depriving an Afro-Asian majority of its political and civil rights.
Today, mercifully, apartheid is a crime against humanity punishable under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.
Hence a healthy balance of laws and men in government is the best prescription to avoid the proscription of justice.
Accordingly, the government’s focus should not be on regime preservation at the expense of law and morality.
Instead, it should accept limits on it size and longevity by preparing for a transition to post-Museveni rule.
Anything less than this is of a piece with the rejection of justice as a moral standard.
We must steer the republic away from the shoals of NRM’s hold on power towards the democratic depths loosening our affairs towards change.
Mr Philip Matogo is a professional copywriter
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