The government is the problem

Aug 18, 2025 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

Kaieteur News – There are many things in public life that look good on paper but which grow dusty in practice. The Freedom of Information Act is one of them. It sits in the law books, solemn and unblinking, like a lighthouse whose bulb has burned out.

The idea behind the legislation is that citizens should have access to the workings of their government, to know what is being done in their name and with their money. The trouble is that if ministries and agencies were truly open, if the officials in them were free to speak frankly with the press, there would be little need for a Freedom of Information Act or a Commissioner of Information. Information would move naturally, like air in a room with the windows open. We would not need a Commissioner of Information to pry loose what should already be flowing.

One of the missteps of the APNU+AFC administration was its mistreatment of the Commissioner of Information. The position, a statutory one, was given the cold shoulder by denying the officeholder his salary. This was not just unkind; it was unlawful. The law provides for that office, and with it, security of tenure. If you want to do away with a thing, do it lawfully. The government should have repealed the legislation and closed the office altogether, rather than to try to starve it into irrelevance.

But APNU+AFC was never much itself into transparency. It kept the oil contract hidden away for 18 months, as if secrecy were a form of national security. When the document was finally published, it was thanks to David Granger, who deserves some credit for that. Yet the timing was wrong.

The truth is, no law, no commissioner, no piece of well-meaning machinery can compel a government to be transparent if it has no inclination. The law offers plenty of grounds to refuse a request. “National security” is the most obliging phrase in the political vocabulary; it can be stretched to cover almost anything. Commercial confidentiality is another; wave it about, and the cupboard stays shut.

So, the Commissioner of Information may knock on the locked doors, but there’s little he can do if the occupants refuse to answer. The failure is not his. The failure is in the government’s unwillingness to regard openness as the default rather than the exception.

Openness is not a radical idea. It is, in fact, the most conservative policy there is. It conserves trust. When officials can explain their actions freely, when decisions are accompanied by reasons rather than excuses, suspicion evaporates. The public is not unreasonable. It can accept mistakes, so long as it knows what they are and how they happened. What it cannot accept is the sense that everything important is being done behind closed doors.

If government were run as an open meeting, the journalists could get their facts from the people who have them, not from leaks, rumours, and half-heard whispers. Policies could be explained before they hardened into resentment. And the citizen could look at his leaders and see not strangers, but people whose work he understands.

The great irony is that secrecy often creates more trouble than disclosure. The oil contract, kept under wraps for eighteen months, did not improve with age. By the time it was released, mistrust had already taken root. Rumours had filled the empty space where facts should have been.

So, if we are honest, the Freedom of Information Act is a crutch for a government that limps in its duty to inform. It is a necessary law only because transparency is treated as an optional courtesy. If the culture were different, if ministers could speak openly, if agencies issued information without being asked, if candor were seen as part of the job description, the law could be repealed without loss.

Until then, we will go on pretending that the Act is the guarantor of some presumed right to information. What matters is the disposition of the people in power. Give us a government that sees the public as a partner rather than an audience, and the rest will take care of itself.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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