FORGET ABOUT THE Freedom of Information Act!

Feb 09, 2011 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

Guyana does not need a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Such an act will become another pretext for denying access to information, because FOI legislation inevitably has clauses allowing the non-release of information on a number of grounds including sensitivity, confidentiality, the fact that it may compromise ongoing negotiations or investigations, or for national security purposes.
And when these grounds cannot be advanced, governments can also find refuge in administrative delays in making available information that the media may need.
The principal beneficiaries of FOI legislation is the media.
The most requests for information under FOI legislation come from media houses.
But if all the countries with FOIAs are evaluated, it will be demonstrated that FOI legislation has not caused any dramatic increase in the availability of previously unavailable information.
The reason is simple. FOI Acts are a smokescreen. They also give the appearance of openness and transparency but in the final analysis there are thousands of ways in which access to information can be denied under FOI Acts.
So having an FOIA in place is not necessarily a good thing, because the very legislation that will create opportunities for public disclosure, can prevent public officials, who would normally freely provide such information, from doing do so. FOI legislation can include provisions to control the release of information, and any unauthorized release can find persons facing sanctions.
What is needed instead is a culture of openness by the government, the principal source for demanded information under any FOI legislation. FOI Acts are not passed to allow members of the public to gain access to information about what took place in opposition parties or to force some member of the private sector to make disclosures about his or her business.
FOI is aimed at ensuring that the business of government is not kept secret.
The problem that journalists will find is that FOI legislation, if ever passed in this country, will affect the timely release of information and can affect the edge of some newspapers, such as Kaieteur News, which is always ahead of its rivals because it always manages to get information which is otherwise being kept under tabs.
Under FOI legislation, any media house can apply for information and this may allow for a bypassing of the informal channels through which many newspapers obtain their information.
But FOI can also be used as an excuse not to release information in a timely way. Take for example, this controversy that is brewing over the purchases of laptops. If under an FOIA this newspaper had applied for the information, then it would have been obligated to await a response from the authorities. The authorities could then indicate that the application is being processed and this would mean that the newspaper would have to delay publication.
These are just some of the pitfalls of having FOI legislation, and all things considered, it would be much better not to have FOI legislation rather than to have it and see the legislation being used to frustrate access to information, which will happen, once such legislation is implemented in Guyana.
What Guyana needs is a culture of openness, whereby public officials are allowed to speak freely to reporters on matters of public interest. This would be a much better goal to strike for, even though it may be just as hard to achieve as the passage of FOI legislation.
When the PPP first came to office in 1992, there was a policy whereby ministers used to meet with the media every week.
Each week someone else was hosted. This was eventually scrapped and the administration began to exercise a tight grip on information. Instead of more information, the process became more controlled, until it reached a stage where only what the government wanted you to hear is what came out.
Now that has to change, but it has to change not through some law, but through greater accountability by ministers to the people of this country. And this is where the effort must be directed: to hold the ministers directly accountable for their portfolios.
To fall into the trap of a centralized system of releasing information, under an FOI Act, would not be in the public’s interest, at least not at this stage where such control is primarily responsible for the officials treating the most basic information as state secrets.

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