A thought that the prestigious School of Law could be an embarrassment after 50 years of existence could pass for a joke, but not to Prof. Joe Oloka-Onyango. The law professor expressed his displeasure with Law School during a public lecture at Makerere University, organized by the School of Law to commemorate its golden jubilee.

As the Makerere University School Of Law marks 50 years of steady progress, Prof. Joe Oloka Onyango thinks that the physical infrastructure of Law School is an embarrassment to the teaching staff and a mockery that constraints provision of quality legal training.

“The Law School physical space is an embarrassment,” Prof. Oloka-Onyango claimed saying that “people come to Makerere University asking ‘is this the great Makerere Law School where Prof. John Jean Barya professes law from?’ unbelievable!”

Ironically, Oloka-Onyango, the constitutional law professor who first joined Makerere University in 1979 as a law student said that over the 50 years of its existence, “what the School of Law has achieved is 10% by design and 90% by mistake: it’s incredible that amidst the storm, we have produced so much.”

Prof. Fredrick Ssempebwa who is one of the pioneers at the School of Law revealed that when they started teaching law, they had less than 30 students in the 1970’s but today lecturers have to grapple with more than 150 students in a class under the same facility.

“It is a very difficult process and we must appreciate the teachers, we have sent out to the world people holding positions of responsibility and I have no doubts about their capabilities.”

However, Counsel Francis Gimara, the former president of Uganda Law Society alleges that the law students at Makerere have been abandoned, the reason why the legal profession in Uganda is under threat.

He says “we were lucky to have passed through the best faculty but today’s challenge to the legal profession is lack of integrity; our education system needs to model moral based lawyers with character and values to fight the mafias in the profession,” something he believes the law school has not emphasized.

Begumya Rushongoza, a fourth year law student appreciates how much he has benefitted from the mentorship by the lecturers however, he calls for a shift from the colonial system of teaching the law to value-based learning of how to handle the law.

He adds that “lecturers should also consider the mental welfare, internal and emotional issues of the students which impact directly on students’ wellbeing rather concentrating on only academic welfare.” Begumya believes such a deliberate approach should radically transform the law school in years to come if adopted.

Makerere University School of Law started in 1968 as a Department within the School of Social Sciences as an affiliate to the University Of East Africa before it became a complete School. Started with just six members of staff, it today boasts of more than 60 teaching staff under four departments with over 1000 undergraduate and postgraduate students after 50 years.