By Watera Atai,
NATIONAL
The Law Development Center (LDC) has asked the Law Council to investigate suspicious first degrees issued by some universities in Uganda.
Annet Karungi, the Head of Bar Course at LDC said they are receiving abnormally high numbers of students with high grades who fail to pass numerous subjects during the training.
Karungi was appearing before the Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Committee where the officials had appeared to defend the 2024/25 national budget framework paper.
“I think the pattern in the recent academic years, they are really not necessarily the best, and many of them actually end up clogging the system by repeating various subjects, something that we have shared with the Law Council and we are hopeful that as a regulator, they will take it up and address it,” Karungi said.
During the meeting, the committee tasked Karungi to explain why some students were not admitted to the Centre despite paying for the course. She however denied the allegations saying there is no student who paid for the current academic year for the current intake of 2023/24 and wasn’t admitted.
During the current intake, she said, “LDC received more than 3000 applicants and because of the limited facilities, all these students couldn’t be taken on.”
“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 Usual county MP, Bosco Okiror was also concerned about some universities which produce so many first-class graduates and wondered whether universities offer genuine degrees.
