By Shaidu Mafabi and Phillip Karugaba
The High Court of Lesotho recently delivered a remarkable judgment. In Teboho Mojapela v Speaker of the National Assembly, the court directed Parliament to enact conflict of interest legislation that the Constitution had mandated since 1993, and which successive Parliaments had simply declined to pass. The court’s reasoning was blunt: Parliament cannot vote to disobey the Constitution. Many members had voted down a private member’s bill on the subject, and the court set that vote aside as unconstitutional, giving Parliament twenty-four months to comply.
In Uganda, we have no such problem. We have had conflict of interest legislation for over two decades. We have defined conflict of interest, criminalised it, decriminalised it, and re-enacted it with civil penalties. The cupboard of our statute books is not bare. The Leadership Code Act, the Anti-Corruption Act, the Companies Act, the Financial Institutions Act, and the Public Procurement and Disposal of Public Assets Act all contain provisions addressing conflicts of interest. The law exists. The question, the uncomfortable, persistent, troubling question, is why we seem constitutionally unable to apply it.
What conflict of interest means
Conflict of interest is defined as a real or seeming incompatibility between one’s private interest and one’s public or fiduciary duties. It is not a complicated concept. It asks a simple question: Does the person making this decision stand to benefit personally from the outcome? If yes, they must declare that interest and step aside. They must not participate in that decision.
Conflict of interest may be actual, where the personal interest is present and operative; potential, where it may materialise in the future; or perceived, where a reasonable observer would conclude that the decision-maker’s judgment could be compromised, even if it has not yet been. The perceived conflict matters as much as the actual one, because public institutions depend on public confidence, and that confidence is destroyed by the appearance of partiality as much as by partiality itself.
There is an old Ugandan saying that the monkey cannot sit as a judge in the case of the forest. It captures something that our most sophisticated legal texts sometimes obscure: the problem is not merely procedural. It is about the basic legitimacy of any decision made by someone with a stake in its outcome. Nobody can expect justice against a forest if a monkey sits in the judgment seat-the very creature that lives in it and benefits from it is the one holding the scales.
Under our Leadership Code Act, a leader who has a personal interest in a matter before a public body must declare that interest and refrain from participating in any deliberation on it. The obligation is not to make the right decision despite the conflict. The obligation is to remove oneself entirely from the process. The rule exists precisely because we cannot trust that even well-intentioned people will subordinate personal gain to public duty when the two collide.
The profession that knows this best
It is interesting that the persons who have felt the sharpest edge of conflict of interest rules are the legal profession itself. The Advocates Act and the Law Council’s professional conduct rules impose strict obligations on advocates to avoid conflicts between their duty to a current client and their obligations to a former one. An advocate who has acted for a client in a matter cannot subsequently act against that same client in the same or a related matter. The confidential information received during the earlier retainer cannot be deployed against the very person who entrusted it.
These rules have been applied with some rigour against advocates, occasionally in circumstances that have felt harsh to the practitioners concerned. Advocates have been restrained from acting, cases have been delayed, and professional reputations have been affected by the strict application of the former-client conflict doctrine. The legal profession has largely accepted this discipline as the price of maintaining public trust in the administration of justice.
The irony is considerable. The same profession whose members have had these rules applied against them with vigour has watched with growing frustration as the far more serious conflicts of interest that arise in public life, commissioners voting on their own emoluments, presiding officers legislating in their own commercial interest, ministers regulating their own industries, pass without consequence. If the monkey cannot sit as a judge in the case of the forest, it is curious that we enforce that principle against lawyers but forget it entirely when politicians are in the chair.
A short and instructive legislative history
Uganda’s legislative treatment of conflict of interest has been, to put it charitably, inconsistent. The Leadership Code first introduced it as a civil matter. In 2009, it was elevated to a criminal offence under the Anti-Corruption Act, carrying a twelve-year prison term or a fine of UGX 100 million or both. This was a serious statement of legislative intent.
Then, in 2017, conflicts of interest were decriminalised. It was removed from the Anti-Corruption Act and returned to the Leadership Code, this time with civil penalties only: a fine of UGX 4 million, demotion, or removal from office. The Inspector General of Government had argued, successfully, that criminal prosecution was too difficult because the standard of proof was too high. The remedy chosen was not to improve the quality of investigations. It was to lower the threshold of accountability.
The consequence is structural. Conflict of interest can now only be prosecuted by the IGG before the Leadership Tribunal. The Director of Public Prosecutions has no role. No private prosecutor may bring such a case. The gatekeeping function sits entirely with one institution. When that institution declines to act, the law becomes a statement of aspiration rather than a rule of conduct.
A painful point is that white-collar financial crime often receives less scrutiny and lighter punishment than blue-collar crime, despite potentially causing greater economic harm, reflecting inequality in enforcement, accountability, and societal perceptions of justice. Let’s compare the fate of the highly placed individuals who diverted mabati meant for the Karamojong community, to roof their goat sheds elsewhere, with hapless social media users now charged with publication of false news about the Chief Justice and a few other highly placed individuals.
The Speaker and the Copyright Bill
The most recent and vivid illustration arrived in March 2026 with the Second Reading of the Copyright and Neighbouring Rights (Amendment) Bill. Among its key provisions was a clause which requires broadcasters and other commercial users of music to pay equitable remuneration to artists and producers every time their work is used. This is the standard that operates in Kenya, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and across the European Union.
Strengthening Governance and Environmental Responsibility: The 2026 Tax Procedure and Miscellaneous BillsDuring the debate, the Speaker of Parliament intervened substantively against the clause. She questioned whether remote stations could realistically be monitored. She used the word “us” when referring to radio station owners. The Speaker of Parliament owns Mama Bukedea FM.
The Speaker presides over parliamentary proceedings. She determines who speaks, manages the pace of debate, and rules on procedural questions. During the Committee Stage, where clauses are amended one by one, the presiding officer wields considerable influence over outcomes. A presiding officer who owns a radio station and has already expressed a substantive view against the clause that would require her station to pay artists cannot credibly claim to be a neutral arbiter of that clause. This is not an accusation of bad faith. It is a structural problem. The monkey cannot sit as a judge in the case of the forest. The appropriate remedy was recusal. It was neither sought nor offered, though required and provided by law in statute and the Rules of Procedure of Parliament (Rule 100).
The Minister in his own sector
These headline cases are accompanied by structural conflicts so normalised that they pass without comment. The long-serving State Minister for Higher Education, Hon. John Chrysostom Muyingo, is reputedly the proprietor of several consistently high-performing schools in Uganda. He has served simultaneously as the minister charged with setting policy for the secondary education sector, in which he himself is a significant commercial actor. Even granting him every benefit of the doubt as to personal integrity, the question a reasonable observer must ask is whether any decision affecting the regulation of private schools can be made by him free from even the appearance of self-interest. The answer is no.
The consequences of this structural gap are not merely theoretical. In 2025, when a student died in one of the minister’s own schools, there was no move to order the closure of the institution to facilitate investigations. However, earlier this week, following the tragic stabbing at a daycare centre, the minister reportedly took direct action, personally visiting the premises and ordering the immediate closure of the facility along with its sister schools.
This is precisely the scenario that the perceived conflict of interest doctrine exists to address. The remedy is not to question the minister’s morality but to remove him from this conflict entirely. That this has not happened, that it has not even been seriously discussed, tells us something important about the way we treat conflicts of interest.
The Parliamentary Commission and the Gang of Four
The copyright debate is not the first time the Speaker has featured in a conflict of interest story. In May 2022, the Parliamentary Commission met and approved personal service awards for Commissioners Mathias Mpuuga, Solomon Silwany, Esther Afoyochan, and Prossy Akampulila Mbabazi, the “Gang of Four”, amounting to UGX 500 million for Mpuuga and UGX 400 million each for the others. The awards were personal-to-holder. They would not pass to successors. The agenda of that same meeting also listed the benefits of both the Speaker and Deputy Speaker for discussion, and the Speaker attended and participated in the deliberations.
This is not a difficult case. Commissioners sat in a meeting to vote on payments to themselves. The conflict was not perceived or potential. It was actual, manifest, and entirely avoidable. The Leadership Code Act required each of them to declare their interest and leave the room. They did not. The Uganda Law Society stated the awards were likely unconstitutional since new emoluments can only be introduced by a Bill or motion on behalf of the Executive, a position confirmed by the Supreme Court in Parliamentary Commission v Mwesigye Wilson.
The IGG found that the MPs had violated the Leadership Code Act. That finding should have been the beginning of a prosecution. Instead, it became the end of the road. The IGG retreated behind the ruling in Bwette Daniel v Parliamentary Commission, a ruling that does not mention the Leadership Code Act and concluded that its mandate was limited. A coalition of advocates wrote to the IGG in September 2024, challenging this reasoning and urging prosecution of the four commissioners and the Speaker. The response has been silence.
The lesson from Lesotho: Courts can compel
The Mojapela judgment is instructive precisely because it addressed institutional paralysis through constitutional compulsion. The National Assembly had voted, by majority, to reject a conflict-of-interest bill. The court held that Parliament cannot use the mechanism of voting to defeat a constitutional obligation. No majority vote could override the Constitution’s command. Parliament was given twenty-four months to comply.
Uganda’s situation is different, but the underlying malaise is the same. Our problem is not the absence of law. It is the selective non-application of law by the institution exclusively empowered to apply it. There is a strong argument that the IGG’s failure to prosecute in the parliamentary service award matter, having already made a positive finding of breach, is itself reviewable by the courts. Judicial review of prosecutorial discretion is not routine, but where an institution has found a breach and then abandoned enforcement on legally unsustainable grounds, the case for review is cogent.
A law without enforcement
Uganda has a conflict of interest law. What it lacks is institutional resolve to enforce it. The Speaker presided over legislation affecting her broadcasting business and participated in deliberations touching her own emoluments. Parliamentary Commissioners voted on payments to themselves. A minister regulates a sector in which he is a major commercial player. In each case, the legal answer is clear. The Leadership Code Act provides it. The difficulty is not doctrinal. It is political.
We apply conflict of interest rules firmly against advocates who act against former clients. We should have the same resolve when commissioners vote on their own pay, when presiding officers legislate in their own commercial interest, and when ministers regulate industries they own. The monkey cannot sit as judge in the case of the forest, whether the monkey wears a wig or sits in the Speaker’s chair.
Lesotho’s Parliament needed a court order to do what the Constitution required. Uganda’s IGG needs something simpler: the willingness to respect its own findings. A law without enforcement is not a law. It is merely a notice.
The authors, Phillip Karugaba and Mafabi Shaidu, are Ugandan legal practitioners: Karugaba is a leading corporate and commercial lawyer and Executive at ENSafrica Uganda, widely recognised for advising on complex, high-value transactions across mergers and acquisitions, capital markets, infrastructure, and energy, while Shaidu is an Advocate of the High Court of Uganda, a legal blogger, and a prominent rule of law commentator.
