The Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA) has expressed sorrow over the seeming failure of the Right to Information (RTI) law.
The foundation insists that the 20 year battle for the realization of the law may have gone down the drain, as most people have not fully grasped the essence of the law, including journalists.
Kwaku Krobea Asante, a Programme Officer under the foundation’s Institutional Development Programme, addressing the level of awareness of the RTI law said, “From where we sit as the Media Foundation for West Africa and having done extensive work on the access to information law over the past 20 years, I still think there is no or very limited knowledge and awareness of the law. Despite being in the 2nd year of its implementation, I say awareness is low.”
He disclosed that the MFWA has tested the law by writing to public institutions in three regions but suffered some challenges.
In an interview on e.TV Ghana’s Fact Sheet show with Samuel Eshun, Kwaku Krobea Asante said, “On our own, we have tried to test this law by writing to public institutions and local government institutions in three different regions to sit back and wait and see how they react to the law. And we made these requests hoping to realize the spirit of the law and what it hopes to achieve.
We also want to test the tenets of the law and what it stipulates institutions to do when they receive such a request and we realized that even among these public institutions whom the law largely bases to be functional, we find very low knowledge and very limited resources to them.”
Switching over to journalists whose mandate is basically to deal with information and educate the public, “their awareness and understanding of the law is also very low.”
According to him, it has already been two years since the law was implemented and believes a considerable number of people should have been well aware of the law.
“I think we are facing this challenge because we basically don’t see much aggressive publicity or visibility campaigns by the institutions that are mandated to do so. This campaign on the law has largely been about coalitions. We don’t seem to get the government contributing to creating awareness on the law.”
He admits it is not only the duty of the government to undertake these educational campaigns but insists they play a huge role.
“It goes two ways but I place much more responsibility in the hands of gov’t. As we all know, it is the Ministry of Information heading this exercise and there is the Right to Information Commission. We have heard a lot of information from the minister on the officers they have trained to sensitize Ghanaians on the law. If we talk about resources to get the work done, it is supposed to be the responsibility of gov’t and we as journalists have to also bear some level of responsibility. This is because we work on the maxim of educating and informing the public, but it largely falls on the authorities,” he added.
The Right to Information (RTI) Bill was passed on 26 March 2019 by the Parliament of Ghana. It received presidential assent on May 21, 2019 and became effective in January, 2020.
Prior to its passage, various stakeholders believed the delay in passing the bill into law was to allow exemptions of certain vital information bordering around government policies which they intend to conceal from the public (Akoto, 2012).
This bill is to enable citizens to hold the government accountable to ensure that there is a high level of transparency in the governance of the country.
