Uganda's answer to corruption: fiery 'Lady Justice'

Inside the hot, stuffy hearing room, already two months into the case of forgotten bank accounts and unexplained fleets of luxury four-wheel drive vehicles, Justice Julie Sebutinde loses her temper - again.

She wags her finger at the witnesses, employees of Uganda's notoriously corrupt tax authority. "Today, I am going to have you for lunch and supper," she barks.

Ms. Sebutinde, a petite, fiery mother of two, is the Ugandan government's weapon of choice against corruption. Her investigations of the police department, the military, and most recently, the tax authority, have exposed graft that has managed to shock a country where public skimming rarely surprises anyone.

All this has made the outspoken, sometimes outrageous "Lady Justice," as she is commonly known, into a celebrity here - Uganda's version of America's tough-talking "Judge Judy." Her popularity illustrates the growing pressure on countries like Uganda - currently ranked third among most-corrupt nations by Transparency International, a watchdog group - to clean up their acts.

With President Bush and other Western leaders calling for measures that would tie aid to good government, fighting corruption can now mean billions of dollars in needed foreign assistance.

"She is our voice," says Brenda Okello, a waitress at Madonna's Restaurant in downtown Kampala, serving plates of roasted goat and steamed bananas to the lunchtime crowd.

The local press, which has referred to her variously as "the probe queen," "the most feared judge in Uganda," and "the iron lady against corruption and thieves," recently named Sebutinde woman of the year in a public poll. She has three bodyguards, and a group of death-row inmates recently even wrote a song entitled, "Sebutinde Come Back," in which they appeal for a second chance.

"In Africa, people are not used to seeing their public officials held accountable for anything," says Sebutinde, who spent her early career working as a government lawyer in Namibia.

She was just a few years into her tenure as a high-court judge in Uganda when, facing growing public outrage, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni's government tapped her to head an inquiry into the police department in 1999. Sebutinde and a team of investigators soon began touring the country, interviewing villagers.

"The police had become an absolute nuisance and untouchable. People just thought it was a waste of time," says Geoffrey Kiryabwire, a lawyer who has assisted in several of Sebutinde's probes. "She just said, 'I don't care who you are. I am a judge and you will answer my questions.' People were amazed."

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