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Now we’ve disappeared the CJ, can we get started with our 380 MPs?

Saturday January 24 2015

There is no doubt a silver lining to even the darkest cloud, and Uganda’s failure to appoint a Chief Justice for two years is a case in point.

Last week, lawyers heeded a call by the president of the law society and boycotted the ceremony to open the new Law Year 2015. The acting CJ, Justice Steven Kavuma, said it didn’t matter as attendance by lawyers was optional.

After that, lawyers took to the traditional and social media to continue castigating President Yoweri Museveni from not appointing a CJ after his attempt to re-appoint the former incumbent, Benjamin Odoki, was rejected because the retiring CJ had clocked the mandatory retirement age for judges of 70 years.

That criticism has been around for two years and arguments have been put forward about the Constitution being violated by not having a head for the judiciary. And in the process, we are not seeing the forest because of staring at one tree.

Even Justice Kavuma’s blunt clue when he said that the lawyers’ presence at the ceremony was not essential was missed by the angry lawyers. He was actually saying that some things may seem important but are not essential.

Maybe even that Law Year opening ceremony itself is not essential and the judiciary can operate without it. That the judiciary has worked for two years without a Chief Justice is the great eye opener Ugandans needed.

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For example, if the lawyers really felt that the judiciary cannot function without a Chief Justice, they would not just be missing the Law Year opening ceremony; they would be missing all court sessions and other legal work in and out of their chambers until a CJ was appointed. Of course they would by now have starved to death, but because they can work without a chief justice, they are working.

And Ugandans are missing this important opportunity to examine the traditional, wasteful way the government is run.

Of course there is no shortage of qualified Ugandan or even expatriate lawyers to appoint as Chief Justice. By not appointing any to the post, the point has been made that having a CJ is symbolically important but not crucial.

We are looking at the Chief Justice tree and missing the forest of 75 ministers and hundreds of Members of Parliament who are less important than the CJ.

Billions would be saved if we got serious and had these scrapped because they are just symbolic or downright unnecessary. The starting point would be of course the 75 ministers. Those can be trimmed to seven and we’ll save money as a result.

Then there are the 380 MPs. Those can be reduced to 38, the exact number the interim parliament had in 1986. Then there are over one hundred presidential advisers, some of whom take a year without having any contact with the president they are paid to advise.

And so on and so forth. It’s time for constitutional lawyers to make proposals for aligning the Constitution with the country’s governance needs after being shown that even the post of Chief Justice can be shelved without affecting work.

Joachim Buwembo is a Knight International Fellow for development journalism. E-mail: [email protected]

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