Justice buried alive: Masaka strike is a cry from within the system
What you need to know:
There is only one judge in the entire Greater Masaka region, tasked with hearing and resolving over 4,290 cases. That’s not a backlog. That’s a burial ground for justice
Lawyers in Greater Masaka have done the unthinkable. They’ve put down their wigs and gowns, walked out of courtrooms, and gone on strike. This is not a tantrum. It is not sabotage. It is not even a protest. It is something deeper, more alarming. It is the justice system itself crying out — from within. The facts are simple, brutal, and heartbreaking.
There is only one judge in the entire Greater Masaka region, tasked with hearing and resolving over 4,290 cases. That’s not a backlog. That’s a burial ground for justice. Let us be honest. Once you subtract weekends, court vacations, public holidays, and judicial leave, a judge has roughly 198 working days in a year. Even at a superhuman pace — say, five trials a day, five days per case — it would take 22 years to clear that backlog. This is not justice delayed. It is justice denied.
No — it is justice buried alive. And that figure doesn’t even account for the aftershocks of the recent Succession Amendment Act, which wiped out thousands of existing Grants of Probate and Letters of Administration. Masaka’s lone judge now faces the additional avalanche of hundreds — possibly thousands — of probate matters. Earlier this year, I visited courts across the country — from Gulu to Arua, from Mbarara to Fort Portal. What I saw in Masaka is not an anomaly.
It is the national condition. One judge. Thousands of cases. Communities waiting, families suffering, justice vanishing. But the Constitution, in its wisdom, foresaw this. It did not leave us without tools. Article 142(2) gives the President, acting on the advice of the Judicial Service Commission (JSC), the power to appoint temporary judges when “the state of business in the courts so requires.” Let us be clear: the state of business in the courts requires it now. These temporary judges — let’s call them mission-based judges — come in not for title or prestige.
They come in to do the work. No pension. No official car. No escort. No right of way. Just a mission: reduce backlog. Serve justice. Then return to their lives. This is not without precedent. When the military is overwhelmed, it calls in the reservists. When hospitals are overwhelmed, the private sector is mobilised. When the police are overstretched, they turn to community policing.
When the courts are overwhelmed, as they now undeniably are, the nation must call upon the Uganda Law Society. That is the spirit — and the urgent purpose — of Article 142(2). But there is a catch. A cruel contradiction. The JSC, the very body mandated to advise the President on such appointments, is not fully constituted. Why? Because the Uganda Law Society’s representatives remain unelected. Their election is stalled — in the very same broken court system they are meant to reform.
This is more than irony. It is dysfunction layered upon dysfunction. A Judicial Service Commission without the Bar is not just incomplete — it is unfit. You cannot prescribe medicine while gagging the physician. In law, as in anatomy, a body without a vital organ does not function. It fails. And when that missing organ is the conscience of the legal profession, its absence is not silence — it is an alarm.
We cannot solve this crisis from the Bench alone. The Bench must hear from the Bar. This strike — if it must be called that — is not rebellion. It is not selfish. It is not political. It is the justice system speaking through the only voice left to it: silence. The silence of locked chambers. Of vacated courtrooms. Of a people tired of waiting for a justice that never arrives. As Dr Martin Luther King Jr once warned, “We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.” This is not just a strike. This is a stand.
Elison is a partner at Kampala
Associated Advocates ( KAA)
