Right to Information: With its new law in place, will Ghana go the way of Nigeria?

On May 21, Ghana's President Nana Akufo-Addo emphasized the Right to Information Act (RTI) passed on March 26 by Parliament.
This law gives citizens the right to seek, access, and receive public information. It aims to enable citizens to access information about public programs and services easily, while at the same time promoting government transparency and combating corruption.

UNESCO argues that freedom of information is "an integral part of the right to freedom of expression." The right to freedom of expression in the region is enshrined in the African Charter of Human and Peoples ' Rights and the Declaration of Principles on Freedom of Expression in Africa.

The law is an important check on government power that allows citizens, media outlets and advocates for human rights to hold government actors accountable for their duties as public servants. In the absence of such laws, it may be more likely that there will be violations of national law and human rights laws.

Program officers at the Open Society Foundations have written that the greatest challenge to the implementation of freedom of information legislation on the continent lies in fears about national security, which governments used as an excuse to curtail transparency: the passage of the RTI Act in Ghana marked the end of a two-decade-old road to a bill drafted in 1999 and was reviewed in 2003;

The bill was finally sent to the parliament in 2010, but in 2017 the thrust for passing the bill swelled. According to Ghanaian media outlet MyJoyOnline, this was due to the formation of the Media Coalition on RTI that, with "support from other civil society organizations over the past 11 months, pressured Parliament to get the Bill passed."

Ghana will join 22 other African countries that have adopted RTI laws (AFEX has a complete list through 2017), but the existence of the law does not guarantee its robust implementation, as others have seen.

Is Ghana going to be like Nigeria?
Nigeria, the close neighbor of Ghana, had a similarly slow legislative process before the Free Information (FOI) was signed into law in May 2011, by Goodluck Jonathan, then President. In the case of Nigeria, a decade of activism preceded the FOI Act, which included three trips through and through the National Assembly of Nigeria.

While civil society and the press were struggling to make government business more transparent and open, they were resisted by the government.

Ayobami Ojebode, a communications professor, wrote that the reasons behind the "willingness" to pass the bill were a manifestation of "the age-long struggle in Nigeria (and elsewhere) between, on the one hand, the press, citizens and civil society and, on the other, the government." Nigeria law gives everyone the right to request information "in the custody or possession of any public official, ag.

But in practice it wasn't that easy to exercise this freedom. In a survey study conducted in 2014, Ifeoma Dunu and Gregory Obinna Ugbo found that most Nigerian journalists underused the act because in practice it is hard to take advantage of it. Despite being aware of the FOI's existence, most of the journalists who participated in the study had "never made use of the law in discharging their journalistic responsibilities." More than 80 percent of respondents said that some government authorities did not comply with the law's principles and that they were challenged by the law.

Only three years after FOI became law in Nigeria, this study was conducted. Today, through FOI applications, many more journalists and civil society groups have maintained tabs on government. One project, known as the FOI Vault, tracks the number of requests to which government agency has been submitted.

Abayomi Akinbo, a development professional, described some of the limitations of FOI applications in Nigeria for Global Voices: the FOI Act still conflicts with the Official Secrets Act, which remains binding on Nigerian public officials. Therefore, since most Nigerian civil servants "think everything is a secret," most FOI requests are either "ignored or answered superficially," which shows that Nigerian civil servants still need to build capacity on the real workings of a FOI request. It also suggests that to eliminate clashes with the FOI, the Official Secrets Act should be amended.

RTI's passage is being watched with muted breath in Ghana. The passage of a law is one thing, as the Nigerian experience has shown, but its implementation is another.