Museveni pledges to support lawyers

President Museveni has vowed to prop up lawyers who have been caught in the crosshairs of recent financial curbs on foreign-aided civil society entities.

After meeting Uganda Law Society’s (ULS) top brass last Friday, the President said in a statement that the lawyers would be supported “if you push that case of importation substitution and let the work be done by local lawyers.” 

Mr Museveni said while he still looks at legal workers “like traders who go to China and bring human hair and sell it here when our women here are equipped with very good hair”, they could yet benefit from some “soft money in Uganda Development Bank.” To get there, the President urged ULS to emulate “tourism that adds blood to us and not taking it from us.”

Lessons could also be learnt, Mr Museveni added, from the inter-religious council which used to get money from Europeans until an ideological clash forced parties to sever ties.

“Europeans wanted them to support homosexuality and when they said ‘no’, they cut them off. We were able to give them state funding. I can see you have the same problem. We shall see how to fund you,” he said.
The President also commended the lawyers for shedding off colonial and neocolonial tags. 

“I think that is why your predecessors were spending so much time on externally pushed issues like human rights etc,” Mr Museveni said. 

He added: “If you are now talking trade, agriculture, industry, regional integration, then I say okay you have now landed. Just like Jesus came to save us, he saw that staying in heaven was not going to help us.” 

He added: “I think the economy is helping you understand better. Being 3,000 you cannot fit in all the narrow spectrum of representing imports. It seems much of your work is to do with criminal issues, a bit of civil like land and then infrastructure. I don’t hear much about advisory services for agriculture, industry, tourism.”

ULS president Pheona Wall said her executive was trying to get its 3,700-strong membership, which is “90 per cent [based] in the city,” to spread out into “regional integration and trying to grow the agriculture, exploit oil and gas sectors.”