Grandiose Parlor

[tag]Reuben Abati[/tag], a columnist for the [tag]Nigerian Guardian[/tag] newspapers writes about the [tag]Freedom Of Information Bill[/tag] and how [tag]President Obasanjo[/tag] becomes an “obstacle that stands in the way of the enactment of legislation” in [tag]Nigeria[/tag].

According to the Wikipedia, “over seventy countries around the world have implemented some form of freedom of information legislation. These laws–also described as open records or (especially in the United States) sunshine laws–set rules on access to information or records held by government bodies.”

The full article is culled from The Sunday Guardian of May 6.
In March 2007, a harmonized version of the bill involving the inputs of both Chambers of the National Assembly was passed to the President for his assent, precisely on March 23. The President has thirty days within which he is constitutionally required to give or withhold his assent to any Bill from the National Assembly, and in the event of the latter, the only option available to the National Assembly is to override the President’s veto, and if it fails to do so, the Bill, as it is, will be aborted a second time, and a new National Assembly when inaugurated will be required to start the process of considering it afresh. This is the status of Nigeria’s Freedom of Information Bill as at this moment.

The deadline for the President’s assent has now lapsed (since April 23). President Obasanjo is on record as saying that he will not sign the Bill into law, and that if the National Assembly overrides his veto, “he will implement the law, but he will not sign the Bill into law unless the President-elect Alhaji Umar Musa Yar’Adua is willing to sign it into law when he assumes office.” A simple deduction is that Nigeria’s Freedom of Information Bill has again run into a cul de sac. President Obasanjo is no longer in a position to implement the law, his tenure of office will expire on May 29, 2007.

The possibility of a Musa Yar’Adua administration signing the Bill into law is countervailed by the fact that a new legislature will be required to make its own laws; and even if that succeeding legislature again takes up the Freedom of Information legislation, there is no guarantee that the future government which in itself is the product of a flawed and fraudulent electoral process, so declared by universal consensus, will be enthusiastic about a piece of legislation that makes access to information a basic and inalienable right of all citizens, since in any case that government from the beginning may have a lot to hide from the prying eyes of the public.

About 70 countries of the world have Freedom of Information Laws. It is also established that access to information is crucial for the making of a good society. Freedom of Information advocacy has therefore necessarily focused on a culture of openness, transparency and accountability to strengthen democracy, support participatory development, economic development, reduce conflict, and ensure good governance and the rule of law.

Yet, President Olusegun Obasanjo has been most adamant in his objection to the Freedom of Information Bill. He made his reasons clear to six representatives of the Freedom of Information Coalition who had visited him, in the last week of April, just before the expiration of the 30 days deadline, as a last minute effort, to lobby him to sign the Bill as presented by the National Assembly. Edetaen Ojo, Executive Director of Media Rights Agenda and a key member of the Freedom of Information Coalition in Nigeria, has given a detailed report of the encounter (The Guardian, April 30, 2007, p. 65) and it is useful to isolate for close discussion the reasons proffered by the President, for they provide illuminating comments on the crisis of access to information in the Nigerian society and perhaps in the African continent generally where to date only four countries, South Africa (2000), Zimbabwe (2002), Angola (2005) and Uganda (2005) have Freedom of Information legislations. It is noteworthy that the Presidency is yet to disown the report by Edetaen Ojo which has been in the public domain for more than a week.

One, the President, according to Edetaen Ojo, said he had not yet received the Bill. Is it possible that the President would not have received a Bill sent to his office by the National Assembly through his own Special Adviser on National Assembly Matters since March 23? This says something about the governance process in Nigeria and it is something that Nigerians would not be surprised about. Strange things including gross incompetence and bare faced lies under the cover of an important office characterize public administration in Nigeria. A document on which government does not intend to act is conveniently declared missing or unseen, and this includes even reports by panels of inquiry or truth and reconciliation commissions set up by government!

But even if the President did not receive a copy of the Bill sent to him by the National Assembly, public advocacy on this piece of legislation has been most fervent and aggressive, and letters have been written directly to the President by institutions and individuals including the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, Presidents Nelson Mandela, and Thabo Mbeki and Bishop Desmond Tutu, urging him to give his assent and make the bill law. Did the President see those letters or not, many of which appeared in the media? Was he not aware of the sustained public debate on the Freedom of Information Bill? If the President pleads innocence on this score, Nigerians would again not be surprised. The Bill was passed to the President at a time when he was very busy preparing for the April 2007 elections.

He was not a candidate in the elections but by his own admission, it was for him a “do or die affair”, and perhaps within the context of that definition, the signing of a Freedom of Information Bill, dealing with issues of good governance and basic human rights, would have been a distraction. In the run up to the 2007 elections in Nigeria, governance practically came to a stop as the entire state machinery was devoted to the winning of the elections by the ruling Peoples Democratic Party. The President not seeing the Freedom of Information Bill on his table, makes this legislation one of the badly served casualties of the 2007 elections. And indeed, Edetaen Ojo quotes him as having said “he has been busy with the campaigns”.

Two, although he did not see the Bill, the President reportedly said that he objects to the Bill in “its present form” and that he has “serious problems” with it. How can he possibly know “the present form” of, or have “serious problems” with a Bill that he has not seen? Again, this should not be surprising. It is standard Nigerian tradition to offer comment on imagined issues no matter how important they may be. What aspects of the Bill as proposed does the President have “serious problems” with? He says the title of the Bill should have been “Right of Information Bill” not “Freedom of Information Bill” which according to him is “imported from somewhere”.

Ojo in his report had told the President that the nomenclature is not important but rather the text of the legislation. He missed the point. The President in making a distinction between “right” and “freedom” was drawing attention to a conceptual crisis. As a rule, the Nigerian government has never had problems supporting anything having to do with human rights, knowing of course that whether it chooses to respect those rights or not lie within the province of its prerogatives. And hence, Nigeria is signatory to so many conventions on human rights, which it routinely violates.

The word “freedom” is much stronger, it connotes “power” at an irreducible level. The irony in independent African states is that their leaders are just as paranoid about the word “freedom” as the colonial authorities that they succeeded. The freedom of the citizen and the individual is as much a problem in post-colonial Africa as it was under colonial rule, because the emergent leaders have proven to be worse than the colonialists. Just as the colonial authorities considered the concept of “freedom” as an alien and corrupting influence, their successors have felt the same way and President Obasanjo in the 21st century has expressed paranoia about the word “freedom”, about the idea of the governed being given any idea that they possess power.

This may have been a Freudian slip in the course of an otherwise light-hearted meeting, but it is historically significant. In his mind’s eye, the President must have imagined a Freedom of Information Law under which information would simply escape freely from the custody of government, into the hands of every Dick and Harry, bearing the title of citizen as a prescription for anarchy!

A caveat though is that the President may have been acting only consistently. The NEEDS document which articulates his government’s reform agenda in Chapter Six thereof, did not speak of a “Freedom of Information Act” but a “Right to Information Act” which it says “will engender openness and feedback through a process of streamlining and rationalizing the system for information collection, collation, storage and dissemination on a timely basis.”. The difference in conception has often been overlooked by Freedom of Information advocates, but it exists.

The truth however is that the attitude of the Nigerian government to the Freedom of Information Bill has been at best ambivalent and contradictory. In 1999, the Bill had been proposed to the Federal Government as worthy of presentation as an Executive Bill. The Government turned it down which led to its being presented subsequently as a private member’s Bill. There are also meeting and divergent points between the aspirations of the Bill and the operations of government.

The President also objected to Section 13(1) of the bill on the grounds that it talks about the need to withhold information that may be injurious to the defence of the country, instead of the security of Nigeria, because in his reckoning, defence and security mean different things. The bogey of national security has been used consistently to frustrate access to information in Nigeria. Media practitioners seeking access to information are routinely accused of subverting national security, whereas what the power elite is more concerned about is its own access to power and security of tenure. The fourth ground of the President’s objection is Section 13(2) of the bill which grants the courts the power to override “the refusal by the head of government or public institution to disclose the information applied for.”

The President fulminated against the idea of a court of law compelling him to divulge any information another head of state may tell him in confidence, and then asked that the Bill should be taken back to the National Assembly for the correction of “these mistakes” identified by him. Not too many Nigerians will be surprised by President Obasanjo’s objection to the Bill’s reference to the courts. In the past eight years, his government has been selective in its obedience of court rulings, choosing which orders to obey and which ones to ignore.

The foregoing excursion is necessary in order to define the exact context of the search for a Freedom of Information Law in Nigeria and the specific challenges being faced by the advocates of such legislation. The long journey of the legislation, government’s ambivalence about Freedom of Information and President’s Obasanjo’s expressed misgivings show how problematic a simple public-oriented process can be in a closed society.

Credit for whatever progress that may have achieved so far, getting the National Assembly to pass the Bill, the mobilization of support for the legislation, general public consciousness about its value and relevance, turning the FOI bill into public agenda, should go to the Freedom of Information Coalition, the various civil society groups, and their international partners which in the past eight years have worked relentlessly to achieve all of these.

Given the present status of the Bill, the key challenge is for the FOI coalition and other stakeholders in civil society not to be deterred by what seems like Presidential indifference or Executive recalcitrance. The present National Assembly before the expiration of its tenure on June 3, should be lobbied to override the President’s veto. It is remarkable that the National Assembly has already shown its willingness to do so.

The legislators must be persuaded to act in the public interest. And when eventually the law is passed, the same enthusiasm and resourcefulness that has been demonstrated in bringing the law to fruition will be required to ensure that it is implemented to the letter. In Nigeria, the challenge is not just in the making of laws, it is in ensuring that the laws are implemented and respected.