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Last weekend saw the marking of 40 years of Rev. Martin Luther King’s world famous speech, “I Have a Dream”.
It was a historic speech delivered one fine August morning, in 1963, at the Lincoln Memorial in the US, to a civil rights mammoth rally of 250,000 people of all races and social backgrounds. This was at a time when in the United States “the land of the free and equal”, African Americans were denied the vote and were in practice second-hand citizens who could not share the same public amenities, such as schools, hospitals, toilets and restaurants with Whites.
Part of this speech, delivered with Dr. King’s fine, truly moving oratorical skills, went as follows: “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self evident; that all men are created equal”.
Through their civil rights movement, African-Americans managed, with time, to cajole the American establishment to extend all the laid down constitutional rights to them. An important point to learn from this experience is that the use of calculated peaceful means, led by civil society, can lead to the extension of democratic rights in the struggle for democratisation.
Actually, in America’s case, this was the pragmatic approach as any attempt to resort to an armed struggle would have proved suicidal, given the balance of forces at hand, if one challenged the world’s wealthiest and strongest state on its home turf. Indeed, the Black Panthers and other subscribers to the armed struggle were to find out.
In contemporary Uganda, a number of leaders, most particularly the DP’s Dr Paul Ssemogerere and his associates, including lawyers Joseph Balikuddembe and the youthful Erias Lukwago, have been at the forefront of championing the cause of broadening the political space through peaceful political action, constitutional petitions, memoranda and public dialogues.
It is amazing, however, that in the same week that the entire world was celebrating the glorious legacy of King and the American civil rights movement, in Kampala the leadership of the Uganda Law Society turned back the democratisation clock when it gagged the constitutionally laid down freedom of speech and _expression_ of lawyers.
A Sunday newspaper reported that the “learned friends” were denied the right to “…participate in radio talk shows, making public comments, writing articles or issuing press statements on legal matters without the Law Council’s permission”!
This truly amusing saga began when the Law Society’s president, Andrew Kasirye rebuked pro-opposition lawyer Lukwago, who was, rightfully in my view, educating the listening public on issues surrounding the ruling Movement’s not having organised elections for its leadership, in addition to its current status as a political system.
Now, in an era most acclaimed for guaranteeing freedom of speech and _expression_, the Law Society’s leadership opted to invoke a typically anachronistic and draconian Regulation 22 of the Advocates (Professional Conduct) Regulation of 1977! A relic put in place at the height of the Idi Amin’s dictatorship, who incidentally died this month!
Invoking this regulation is perhaps the Law Society’s way to mark the legacy of Aminism - at our expense!
In the past, the leadership of the Uganda Law Society has mainly been the vanguard of our civil liberties. For instance, sometime in 1980, its then President Sam Kalega Njuba was detained, without trial, by the Military Commission regime, at the then dreaded Makindye Military Police Barracks for criticising its appalling human rights record.
Elsewhere, lawyers have been at the forefront of the recent struggle for Africa’s democratisation, starting mainly in the early 1990s. In nearby Kenya, vivid examples are activists such as former vice president Michael Kijana Wamalwa (RIP), Paul Muite and Dr Willy Mutunga.
Apart from the ability to interpret laws, their principled politics was mainly based on their ability to survive without having to subsist on the state, through their private legal chambers.
Civil society, especially so this country’s legal fraternity, has to play its rightful role in safeguarding the Constitution and furthering the democratisation cause, through civil means. The current message from the Law Society is uninspiring and sad, more especially at this juncture in our history. | 
