By JOACHIM BUWEMBO

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Uganda’s Chief Justice Bart Katureebe must be a sad man. Katureebe is a good man in a not-so-good system. He’s retiring with an impeccable service record, having made considerable contribution to the country’s Judiciary. Among his tangible contributions in his half a decade at the helm of the Judiciary, he has spearheaded digitising the case management process to speed up justice delivery. For even us laymen know that justice delayed is justice denied.

Sadly, Katureebe leaves when the perception that legal justice in Uganda is for the rich and the mighty still reigns high.

Whatever law reform programmes we have had, none has addressed the rule of sub judice to which has the effect of excluding contribution of people who have not been called as witnesses yet may have useful information that could save legal justice from becoming a farce. Two examples of cases that have been determined during Katureebe’s last two weeks in office come to mind. One started with a robbery.

Some time ago, a car was robbed, then recovered and kept at a police station in the city. It was auctioned and bought by a senior police officer’s wife for a song, about $200. Later, the original owner (robbery victim) traces the car and goes to court. A few days ago, the High Court ruled and condemned the taxpayer to pay $75,000 to the former owner.

The second case was determined a week or so earlier, also by the High Court. When climate change awareness was at its height a decade earlier, Uganda too realised the need to fight environmental abuse — and also remember that the last Pope made abusing the environment a mortal sin.

So our government ordered the cancellation of all land titles that had been issued for wetlands. A man was starting to mine sand in a major wetland not so far from Kampala, and some sensible government officials stopped him in order to avert the abuse. The man went to the High Court and the learned judge in his legal wisdom condemned the taxpayers of this impoverished and debt-ridden country to paying him a whopping $50 million!

Obviously, if the law does not bar anybody from commenting on matters that are before court, millions of citizens would have informed the court that degradation of the wetland was dangerous to the country and mankind; that government had prohibited mining of the wetlands; that the president is currently only cautiously exploring the use of such wetlands for fish farming but is preaching against other forms of wetland use. If courts were given such information and allowed to use it to inform their judgment, the taxpayers wouldn’t be punished so harshly for sins they were not party to.

If only these two sordid cases were isolated incidents! Sadly, they aren’t. Many informed people know that a huge chunk of Uganda’s national debt is constituted by court awards of that nature. In Uganda, you just need to get a corrupt civil servant to allocate you a public property, and soon enough, upright officials will come up and stop you from using or managing the public asset. You to court and get awarded billions of shillings for the ‘loss’.

But all along, people are talking about the heist you are perpetrating, but court is not supposed to entertain such noises however loud, as they are sub judice.

So sub judice leads to sub justice which breeds mob justice. Many years ago, mob justice just referred to the lynching of suspected chicken thieves in the village and pickpockets in the towns.

Today, mob justice has taken a new face. When big people start grabbing public properties with impunity and courts reward them big monies, small people react by grabbing small public spaces which amount to big spaces. Their easiest target are the road reserves.

They erect their trading premises and even residences in the road reserves and when expansion of the road is planned, they have to be compensated heavily, making infrastructure development grossly expensive.

Needless to add, the big people also cash in by making false claims over places they were never supposed to own on the same place, and also get compensated in billions. The whole thing loses meaning and actually creates some form of organised anarchy.

Will Katureebe’s successor take some steps to see that the law starts only serving the citizens instead of often being (mis)used to rob their taxes?

As we wish the worthy, honourable Justice Katureebe a peaceful retirement, we pray that his successor will find time to think outside the box to initiate the plugging of legal loopholes that are deepening Uganda’s public debt through reckless legal awards.

Buwembo is a Kampala-based journalist. E-mail:[email protected]