By Our Reporter
NATIONAL
The Law Development Center (LDC) has revealed that some Ugandan Universities are issuing fake first class law degrees.
This was revealed by Annet Karungi, Head Bar Course at Law Development Centre while appearing before the Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Committee today, 8th January, 2024.
The LDC team was at parliament to defend the 2024/25 national budget framework paper.
She asked Law Council to investigate what she called suspicious first degrees issued by some Universities in Uganda. She says LDC has received abnormally high numbers of students with high grades, but during training, these clog LDC’s system due to the failure to pass numerous subjects.
“I think we have observed that the pattern in the last academic years they are really not necessarily the best, and many of them (students) actually end up clogging the system, repeating various subjects. So it is something we have shared with Law Council and we are hopeful as a regulator, they will take it up and address it at the time of regulation and accreditation of the law Schools,” said Karungi.
“In the process of admission, we realized that something is coming up, but I believe Law Council will handle it. You find that applicants from certain Universities, almost the entire class have first class or upper second class, so we have to devise a fair method of admission and we decided to take on 60% from each University. So what we did, ranking from the first to 60% , we took on the top most from each University, the rest were admitted and given offer letters for next academic year, which is really guaranteed,” added Karungi.
The MPs had asked the Centre to explain why some students weren’t admitted to the Centre, despite paying for the course.
Karungi denied allegations that LDC declined to admit some students, saying there is no student who paid for the current academic year for the current intake of 2023/24 and wasn’t admitted but rather, during the current intake, LDC received more than 3000 applicants and because of the limited facilities, all these students couldn’t be taken on.
