By Adam Nuwamanya
ADDIS ABABA — Uganda Law Society President Isaac Ssemakadde, SC, has urged young lawyers across East Africa to embrace courage, principled advocacy, and strategic risk management, warning that truth-telling often comes with a personal cost.
Speaking as a panellist at the 30th East African Law Society Annual Conference and General Meeting in Addis Ababa, during a session on “Law, Politics and Governance: The Role of the Young Lawyer,” Ssemakadde reflected on what he described as the political pressures and threats that have accompanied his public stance for a “Radical New Bar.”
President Ssemakadde was joined on the panel by several notable Bar leaders, including Bâtonnier Jean-Paul Kitenge Kabundji of the Haut Katanga Bar in the DRC; Laetitia Petro, Vice President of the Tanganyika Law Society; Marjorie Yar Henepin of the South Sudan Bar Association; and Vincent Munyanga Githaiga, Managing Partner at Munyanga Githaiga Advocates LLP in Kenya.
“In my own journey, I have come under significant political pressure arising from the ideas I espouse,” he said. “From the outset, I understood that publicly advocating such ideas carried real risks—prison, exile, and even threats to life.”
He recounted receiving credible intelligence of an imminent arrest, prompting him to temporarily leave Uganda for Rwanda. “This was not panic; it was preparation,” he noted. “Risk must be anticipated and managed—not wished away.”
Ssemakadde expressed gratitude to members of the East African Law Society who supported him during that period, saying their solidarity affirmed that “while the risks are personal, the struggle for constitutionalism and the rule of law is collective.”
At the heart of his message was a stark critique of what he termed the “capture” of key institutions.
“Truth is bitter,” he told the audience. “And the truth we exposed can be summarized in one word: capture—of institutions, of the Bar, of the courts, and of democracy itself.”
He argued that genuine legal practice cannot thrive under undemocratic governance. “You cannot have a genuine legal profession inside a non-democracy,” he said. “If you live under a dictatorship and still tell yourself that holding a practicing certificate makes you free, then you are lying to yourself.”
Ssemakadde said declining public trust in the legal profession stems from decades of “professional hypocrisy,” a reality that young lawyers entering the field today must confront. “You can be ethical, brilliant, and innovative,” he warned, “but if the system itself is captured, those virtues alone will not protect you.”
He emphasized that lawyers, not ordinary citizens, are responsible for creating and entrenching systems of dictatorship and therefore must lead efforts to dismantle them. “Dictators are not created by farmers,” he asserted. “They are created by lawyers in the Executive, the Legislature, and the Judiciary.”
Ssemakadde urged young lawyers to reject the belief that leadership is confined to formal Bar positions, calling them the “most unfiltered and unowned” members of the profession. Citing rising enrollment numbers—over 900 new lawyers in a single month in Kenya and more than 3,000 in Uganda during his tenure—he framed young practitioners as a growing force for change.
“These young lawyers must not just get jobs,” he concluded. “They must be given a mission: do not fear truth, do not fear leadership, and never fear challenging the false tables where your future is being decided without you.”