Many a student at the Law Development Centre (LDC) were excited the moment the President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni announced that schools including higher institutions of learning would be closed for 30 days starting Friday midday as a measure to protect Ugandans from the COVID – 19 a.k.a Coronavirus.
LDC released a statement in compliance with the presidential directive and laid down its own timeline for the closure of the centre and suspension of activities for the remaining 1 and a half day.
“The (LDC) shall be closed for a period of 30 days with effect from Midday, Friday 20th March to Sunday 19th April 2020” reads the statement from the Frank Nigel Othembi, the Director of LDC.
It should be noted that students at the Centre started their intense oral examination rounds this week, the 16th March and were scheduled to take a normal course until final conclusions days later.
However, following the president’s closure of what he termed “concentration points”, LDC has decided to take the students/lawyers on a marathon ride.
Paragraph 5 of the statement reads that “academic activities including lectures, the ongoing Bar Course Oral Examinations and other examinations shall continue until Midday Friday 20th March, 2020”. However, this somewhat good news does not seem what it looks or look what it seems.
Campus Bee has received a screenshot of a text presumably authored by the head bar course at LDC, whose signature is initialled as “HBC”.
“All heads of subject are hereby instructed to have the orals conducted before the end of Friday this week” reads the text that has gotten many wishing for the actual postponement of the examinations and not make the said postponement as mentioned in the statement look ceremonial as it would have been over taken by events.
From what we gather, the conduct of the exams has not been regular as students can be called at any time or any day to attend to a panel irrespective of what the time table says. Ordinarily would be with 1 subject a day, and the rest of the students unattended moved to the following day. With this normal procedure, there is a possibility of students having a lot of subjects left (out of the total 5) and have not even yet answered to half or more of these being pressurised to do the remaining lot in the remaining time, hence “marathon”.
To achieve the possibility of running the orals before closure time, the statement also reads that the time for finishing of orals yesterday and today will be moved from 6pm to 8pm as if to allow the pressure to be fully materialize.
The statement ends with LDC saying that normal activities will resume on the 20th April 2020 “unless advised otherwise”, which could mean the period might be extended as the possibility of Uganda (God forbid) getting her first case of the virus looms.
It would be good news to hear that the cure is actually discovered before then, or as the trendy Whatsapp/Likee video meme highlights, Uganda will try to “catch” the virus such that the known to be corrupt officials land on the billions that the United Nations has promised developing countries with the virus, but as it tries to, the virus would be a head of them, not infecting Uganda, taking long strides away, unreachable as we miss the billions.
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