Nigeria: The Freedom of Information Bill Dies Again

The House of Representatives has again failed to pass the Freedom of Information Bill into law:

The failure on Tuesday, the fifth since the debate on the bill started, heightened anxiety on the floor of the House with a member, Mrs. Abike Dabiri (sponsor), warning that corruption could not be successfully checked without the the FOI bill.

The bill had suffered a similar fate on four previous occasions. It was learnt that some lawmakers, particularly those who had held political appointments in the past, were not comfortable with the bill. Investigations showed that the legislators were afraid that when passed into law, the FOI bill would give the media a license to dig into their past dealings.

What the Federal Representatives did was stepping from the smoke screen to reveal their true colors. Paraphrasing Maxwell Kadiri via Vanguard (FOI bill: House of Reps sounds death knell for accountable government in Nigeria):

Last Tuesday represents one of the darkest days of legislative proceedings in Nigeria’s Fourth Republic and the Honourable Dimeji Bankole-led House of Representative lost a unique opportunity to build on the moral high ground that it gained with its recent actions post the Etteh-gate saga and by so doing failed Nigerians when it mattered most.

If there is one thing Nigeria needs more than ever - that will be creating a high fidelity system of checks and balances, what the FOI Act would have help initiate or strengthened. The passage of FOI bill would have made governance more transparent and relevant - and its workings more visible - to the ordinary citizen, since the FOI Act would have mandated the ‘government’ to disclose records requested in writing by any person.

As it is operationalized in the United States, the FOI Act “allows for the full or partial disclosure of previously unreleased information and documents controlled by the United States Government. The Act defines agency records subject to disclosure, outlines mandatory disclosure procedures and grants nine exemptions to the statute.”

The FOI Act is a must-have addition to the Nigerian constitution, without which the country will ever remain at the mercy of the marauding political appointees and self-serving bureaucrats.