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“Freedom of Information and Public
Participation:
The Morality of Good Governance”
A Text of Presentation by Dr. Sam
Amadi, Special Adviser to the President of the Senate on the Public
Hearing on the Freedom of Information bill By the Senate Committee on
Information on April 26, 2005
Introduction:
The travails of the Freedom of Information Bill are a
commentary on the relationship between politics and the public good. This
bill has been making a slow and laborious journey through the nooks and
corners of the National Assembly for more than three years. One would
expect that a bill of such importance as the freedom of information bill
would have a jolly fast-tract ride to passage, especially when bills of
questionable public interest passed the legislative musters with little
hassles. This apparent contradiction reinforces the truth of what public
choice theorists have observed long ago, that the passage of law in the
legislature is proportionally related to the power of the special
interests that stand to gain when such law is passed. These theorists take
the view that special interests are the true patrons of legislators, and
not the electorates. We need not agree entirely with these theorists, but
we may quickly note that the different outcomes for different legislative
proposals suggest that asymmetry of power is an important factor to
consider when analyzing the work of legislatures.
The travails of the freedom of information bill are also a
reminder to civil society organizations and public spirited individuals
who intend to use the legislature to transform their society that
ultimately power is what counts in getting things done in government,
whether in the executive or the legislature. And let’s get this clear.
Power is more than money or political authority. Power includes all those
attributes and resources which allow a person to influence the course of
events. Political theorists generally classify power into soft power and
hard power. Oftentimes, what gets result is soft power. Former Dean of
the Kennedy School of Government and the author of “Soft Power: How
America Can Rule the World” has persistently urged the United States, the
world only super-Power, to pay attention to how it exercises soft-power
because ultimately what counts is soft-power. The power to build a
coalition is soft-power. The power to outwit entrenched and powerful
interest groups even though you’re an under-dog is soft-power. The power
to influence legislative agenda through the use of intellectual resources
is soft power. Soft power is simply the power to persuade without
coercion or threat of sanction. I think we are at the threshold of making
history with the passage of freedom of information bill by the National
Assembly because of the effective use of soft power by the coalition on
freedom of information bill.
Now, there might still be some persons who still doubt the
utility of this kind of bill in spite of all the powerful argument
marshaled in support of the bill. To such persons, I add an argument from
a moral and religious point of view. I offer this argument from the point
of view of my position as the Coordinator of the Christian Network on
Justice & Community (CNJC) and as the Chief Coordinator of the Think-Tank
to the Catholic Bishop Conference of Nigeria. My argument is simple:
There is a right to freedom of information and there is a need for freedom
of information. Both the right to information and the need for
information relate to our nature as creations of God, as creatures who
share both divine and human nature, and as creatures who hold a fiduciary
responsible to care for the earth and its bounteous resources.
Freedom of Information: The Right to Know:
Whether there is a legal right to information is not as
important as whether there is a moral right to information. The reason is
that the National Assembly exists to create such rights where they are
absent and necessary. So, it is of little importance that there is no
right to know since such a right can be created by legislative action.
But, fortunately, there is a legal right to know. The Nigerian
Constitution guarantees to every person freedom to express their opinion
and to share information. This right is interpreted to require the
opportunity to receive information.
To legally establish the right to receive information as a
derivative right is not difficult. The Supreme Court has established that
in the case of the right to free movement, a right to hold and possess a
passport as a facility for the meaningful enjoyment of the right of free
movement is incontestable. Passport is a facility for the enjoyment of
the freedom of movement. Similarly, the right to receive information
(which I dub the “right to know”) is a facility for the meaningful
enjoyment of the freedom of expression.
The legal foundation of the right to know is further
enhanced by the provisions of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’
Rights and the various adumbrations by regional and international bodies
charged with establishing standards and best practices in political
governance. The most significant of these adumbrations is the set of
principles established by the leadership of the African Union at a summit
at Maputo, Mozambique in July 2003 which elaborated on Article 9 of the
African Charter. Notably, these principles recognize the “right of
everyone to access information held by public bodies”. This right boils
down to the principle that, “public bodies hold information not for
themselves but as custodians of the public good and everyone has a right
to access this information”. Since African governments, with the Nigerian
government as a key player, are proclaiming a new dawn of democratic
governance, it is important to make this enunciation of Article 9 of the
African Charter the fundamental pillar of civil governance.
I am more concerned about the morality of freedom of
information. What is the moral right to know? The moral right to know is
based on the concept of human dignity. The dignity of human beings
requires that we do not treat them as means to an end no matter how
lofty. Human beings are dignified so long as we consider them as
important agents that make history. As agents, there have need for
resources to fully discharged their agency. There is a growing confusion
about the philosophical basis for justifying human rights, including the
right to know. Conceptions of natural rights which derives from the
ex-cathedral injunctions of God is out of favor with majority of liberals
who discounted the idea of the metaphysical in constructing a legitimate
world. Political philosophers and human rights scholars construct
rational schemes to justify why people should be accorded rights which are
pre-political. The best they have done is to propound a theory of
entitlement based on the idea of agency.
There is a way we ought to treat an agent. Immanuel Kant
laid a categorical imperative for moral behavior, to wit, everyone ought
to act in a way that he treats others as ends in themselves. Dworkin and
Rawls have expanded this to require that we treat persons as equals. The
religious roots of both the doctrines of human rights and the liberalism
are beyond dispute. Both John Locke and Immanuel Kant, two heroic figures
in western liberal discourse of rights are religious protagonist whose
scholarship were based on the pursuit of religious justification of the
democratic system of government. I want to sketch a religious
justification of the right to know based on the idea of human beings as
agents.
The Bible teaches God created human beings to effectively
utilize earth’s resources for their spiritual, material and moral
flourishing. In the Genesis account of creation God placed the
responsibility of management of the earth on the shoulders of human
beings. He went further to empower them by placing limitations on what
can be done to human beings. The famous Ten Commandments capture the
dignity of human beings and their special regard as agent. But for the
purpose of political arrangements, the finest enunciation of the rights
which human beings have as agents is in Numbers Chapter 16. In providing
for political government for the people of Israel, God mandated that their
King should not conscript the people forcefully into slave labor, should
not expropriate the people and should not enrich himself from the common
good. In essence, God placed constitutional limitation to what the state
can do against citizens.
Different Christian traditions have emphasized what the
divine origin and dignity of human beings means for the structure and
institutions of politics. The Catholic Church has developed a body of
social teaching that emphasized integral development. The bedrock of this
teaching is the recognition that human beings are created in the image of
God. This image is not defaced by human frailty, political corruption or
the accidents of class, caste and property. Protestant and evangelistic
Christians also have their views of the meaning of the divine creation of
human beings. But, the common position is that as agents, persons are
entitled to be treated in a particular.
The moral right to know can be stated as the right
citizens have to receive information so that their dignity and equality
are protected. Since information is power, it amount to treating people
unequally if some officials keep to themselves vital information whilst
the rest of the society languish in misinformation or lack of
information. The make information accessible to all at little cost we are
equalizing power and opportunity for individuals for make their life what
they want it to be.
Freedom of Information: the NEED to know:
The right to know leads to the need to know. Why do we
need information? Information is an important resource for human
development. Information is a raw material for the production of
knowledge. Knowledge is critical to transformation in the private and
public domain. The social teaching of the Catholic advocates an integral
approach to development. Now, this approach is predicated on the idea of
solidarity. We work together with other human beings who share similar
hopes, risks and vulnerability like us. In order to engage public
institutions and make them serve our needs we need to have information on
how these institutions work. If this information is subject to the whims
and caprices of state officials who may have incentives not to disclose
them, then the ideal of citizens as agents of beneficial social change is
imperiled.
Another important social teaching of the church is the
doctrine subsidiarity. This requires that important political actions be
executed at the level of society where their benefits are most. Thus,
local communities should handle what pertain to their localities. Now,
this important principle of political governance will be undermined if the
people at the local level do not have access to information that enables
them to understand and control the process of governance.
Take the example of ant-corruption campaign. Stakeholders
are urging action at the state and local government levels. Now, imagine
the tact that federal government officials are sermonizing about the need
to hold local government officials accountable for the absence of social
amenities in their domains and fails to make public the monthly
allocations of these malfeasant officials. How will the process of
accountability work in these local communities if the local people do not
have access to information about federal allocations? This will amount to
asking Hebrew slaves to mould bricks with straw.
So, the argument is simple. If you want to treat people
dignifiedly, then you need to make available quality information so that
they can meaningfully contribute to developing their human and social
environment. Human beings have need for information because information
is the straw to build the society. And if the state prohibits access to
vital information through legislations and administrative procedures, then
they are not treating people as agents. They are treating them as mean to
an end, the end of building a human society without dignified human
being. The best case for the right to freedom of information is that we
need information to be the agents God created us to be.
Conclusion:
I commend the Senate Committee on Information for the
opportunity of the Public Hearing on the Freedom of Information Bill. I
commend the Coalition on Freedom of Information Bill for a heroic struggle
to get this bill this far. There are more challenges ahead before the
bill is passed into law. We overcome these challenges and enlist more
enthusiastic supporters if we keep this message in the public domain: the
right to information and the need for information define our essence as
agents of change and children of a dignified God.
Thank you and God Bless all. |
