Freedom of Information Law and Good Governance: The Curse of Corruption in Sierra Leone

427 Pages·2021·4.031 MB·English

by  Emmanuel Saffa Abdulai

Freedom of
Information Law and
Good Governance
The Curse of Corruption in
Sierra Leone
Emmanuel Saffa Abdulai
Freedom of Information Law and Good
Governance
“The absence of the right to know is intrinsically linked to the political economy
of (under) development that continues to generate mass poverty for Africa’s teem-
ing inhabitants. A functional/workable freedom of information act could provide
a solid bulwark to corruption, authoritarian regimes and underdevelopment. Here
is the compelling voice of a committed scholar-activist—a key participant in the
conception and delivery of the RTAI act in Sierra Leone. His passionate interven-
tion, speaking truth to power, should be read by anyone interested in progressive
change in Africa—and that should include all of us.”
—Ibrahim Abdullah, Professor of History and African Studies,
University of Sierra Leone
Emmanuel Saffa Abdulai
Freedom of
Information Law and
Good Governance
The Curse of Corruption in Sierra Leone
Emmanuel Saffa Abdulai
Department of Law
Fourah Bay College, University of Sierra Leone
Freetown, Sierra Leone
ISBN 978-3-030-83657-3 ISBN 978-3-030-83658-0 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83658-0
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P
reface
My involvement in the campaign for a Freedom of Information (FOI) law
was a deeply personal one that in turn extensively shaped my professional
development and entire life trajectory. At the risk of stating the obvious,
while all our personal experiences shape our professional commitments
and while FOI has most certainly not been my only professional passion,
my conversion to the doctrine at an early stage in my career instilled a
constant interactive influence between these sectors, with the personal and
the professional continuously informing each other. This has been the case
from my very first introduction to FOI by the World Bank in 2003, to my
leadership of the FOI campaign, and my involvement in the activities of
regional and sub-regional coalitions, in order to facilitate the passage of
Sierra Leone’s FOI law, to my current tenure as the chair of the governing
council of the African Freedom of Information Centre.
Perhaps it would be more of a truism to state that a huge chunk of my
life has been dedicated to the mastery and the propagation of the ideal,
than to lay bare the gaping wound, the haunting trauma which spurred
me to seek a balm in the therapeutic properties of a struggle, and of
FOI. It was the abduction and forced recruitment of my brother in
Kailahun by the RUF that propelled me on a search for answers to the
perplexing questions of why he, like countless others, had died gratu-
itously amid inconceivable horrors, and how to guarantee that such sense-
less violence was never again unleashed. As a young, striving student in
Freetown, I sought a solution to Sierra Leone’s plight. I was motivated by
my youthful angst triggered by the war, by my adolescent fascination with
revolutionary figures and freedom fighters like Nelson Mandela and by my
v
vi PREFACE
exposure to democratic notions to establish a small organization called
Youth Action Network, which in 2003 morphed into the Society for
Democratic Initiatives (SDI).
My search for the truth led me to query, at times obsessively, the how
and why of our predicament and to consume information on potential
feasible solutions. The upshot was my discovery of the merits of FOI,
which with youthful exuberance I marvelled over. I had struck gold, or
rather, excavated a prize gem; the cure-all to Sierra Leone’s ills. I was
swayed and enamoured once and for all by the principle that the citizenry
once empowered with information would be better placed to hold its gov-
ernors to account. These principles compelled me to dedicate the best of
myself to this dogma, this—as I then saw it—saving grace.
I joined the already existing national FOI coalition and, once it col-
lapsed, assumed leadership of the campaign. With the support and assis-
tance of a few other adherents, I sought to reassemble the coalition,
determine its agenda and ensure its productivity. With the coalition begin-
ning to crystallize, we stayed the course, mobilizing youth and women’s
organizations. Sadly our passion for, and commitment to, the arduous
ten-year campaign for an FOI law waned as we were side-tracked and dis-
tracted by personal politics and personality clashes; essentially a war waged
between the starry-eyed idealists, profit-seeking pragmatists and power-
hungry control freaks, while the usual attempted commercialization of
NGO work loomed somewhere in the background. Fundraising for the
campaign was a major challenge, as was Sierra Leone’s overwhelming cul-
ture of secrecy. To crown it all, we grappled with the stark incredulity of
the general public and members of the coalition itself, faced with the lead-
ership of a fresh-faced sixth form student.
We toiled, we wrote, we pushed, we lobbied and we trekked the length
and breadth of this country to educate, and we reached out through the
usual media of television and radio. Meanwhile, the campaign surged and
relented in its momentum as I made my way into the world, only much
later drafting the FOI bill, in 2005, as a novice law student and civil soci-
ety practitioner. My personal recollection is of the Tejan Kabbah govern-
ment being totally disinterested in the campaign, while the succeeding
Koroma government paid mere lip service to the idea of an FOI law. What
is more, our struggle was hampered by, I must admit in retrospect, was a
juvenile and over-militant torchbearer. However, with some level of inter-
national influence, the FOI Act was ultimately passed in 2013.
PREFACE vii
The passage of the RTAI Act 2013 underscored the need to document
the campaign history and the contours of the concept, as well as the antici-
pated dynamics of the Act; it was evident that the necessary starting point
for the concept of FOI should be self-application. Notably, this book seeks
to serve as an interdisciplinary reference source for FOI in Sierra Leone,
for all interested parties, but especially tertiary students at all levels, and
specifically to address the current challenges to FOI. I sought to compile
a work that would be rich, detailed and most of all, leave its mark. My
starting point was the contemplation of my law degree dissertation, writ-
ten in 2007, on the subject of access to information (ATI) as a mechanism
for judicial independence and justice sector reform. My time on the com-
parative media law and policy course at the Centre for Socio-legal Studies,
Oxford University, and on the LLM in Human Rights at the Central
European University both afforded me the opportunity to further refine
my ideas and make the necessary conceptual connections.
This work was, at least initially, birthed in a disjointed, uncoordinated,
sporadic and spontaneous manner, a couple of inspired paragraphs saved
here and there (in my inbox, on my iPad, my personal laptop, my office
desktop, my phone), and chiselled progressively and irregularly into shape;
sections written inflight or in a hotel room as the day closed on a busy
workshop. That work has been subjected to a process of constant review
and updating during the course of its coalescence. My work was also
shaped by the substance and methodologies of FOI workshops and inter-
views conducted where my arguments needed compelling and timely evi-
dence. Chapter 5 was written during my fellowship at the International
Forum for Democratic Studies, at the National Endowment for Democracy,
specifically in response to the criticisms I had encountered, levied against
FOI by politicians. Two other chapters were written after the completion
of an SDI project that investigated the use of ATI in relation to the extrac-
tive industry and in relation to local government in 2009. The data sup-
porting these chapters was collected during this work, a fact fully
acknowledged within the body of this work, and in the actual follow-up
activities and reports produced by SDI.
I remain very concerned about our far-from-exhaustive employ of the
RTAI Act 2013 as a country. Although civil society and activists are cur-
rently employing the law, journalists are reluctant to do so, since they
perceive it as slow. As it stands, the political will for the implementation of
the RTAI Act does indeed exist, but there is a seeming lack of appreciation
of the Act by those appointed to steer its implementation. Additionally,
viii PREFACE
the RTAI Commission seems at present to be in a state of disarray due to
disagreements between Commissioners, and there is pushback from within
the public service. My hope is that the Bio administration will employ this
book to fully support the implementation of the Act, so that it illuminates
all quarters of bureaucratic administration and management that touch
the lives of the public and invigorates the struggle against corruption. I
remain optimistic given the RTAI Commission’s recent adoption of a
name and shame approach to the failure of public institutions to report on
their implementation of the Act. I stress, however, that there is still a need
to raise the public’s awareness that the success of the Act depends on their
making regular use of it, and also that donors must seek to ensure that the
Act is employed to achieve transparency and accountability. The theory is
that FOI laws should import transparency into areas like public finance
management, public procurement and judicial reforms, and we must at
the very least seek to test this theory out.
I am of the strong belief that the research supporting this book is exten-
sive and that its methodology is sturdy and formidable. I do acknowledge
that this work does contain certain shortcomings, especially insofar as
uncorroborated pieces of evidence are concerned, as a consequence of the
ad hoc/inconsistent manner in which it was compiled, and the duration of
the writing process. Ultimately, one notes that there are books organized
like a Teutonic banquet. This book attempts to implement the modest
organizing principles of a Russian Zakouska, spreading out on the table
such a variety of hors d’oeuvres, so that everyone will find something to
their taste. It is my hope that anyone with an interest in International
Affairs, Law, Political Science, Peace and Conflict Studies, Public Policy,
History, Development Studies and other Social Sciences will find some-
thing of interest in its pages. We certainly cannot afford to rest on our
oars, and we clearly will have to exert ourselves rowing upstream, but we
can at the very least afford ourselves a brief sense of a thrill, a fleeting
breath of satisfaction. The journey has only just begun.
Freetown, Sierra Leone Emmanuel Saffa Abdulai
f
oreword
This book addresses the essence of good governance: the notion of demo-
cratic accountability, which can only be guaranteed by transparency in
public affairs. Freedom of Information and Good Governance: the Curse of
Corruption in Sierra Leone is a compelling argument for citizens’ right to
access public information, embodied in the enactment of the Freedom of
Information Act in every country. Emmanuel Saffa Abdulai, one of the
country’s leading lawyers and anti-corruption activists, makes a case for it
in compelling terms. In countries that have enacted a Freedom of
Information Act—fewer than half in Africa—there is generally less poverty
and underdevelopment and a better-developed system of democratic gov-
ernance and framework for human rights protection than in those coun-
tries that have not. “The practice of true democracy and the protection of
human rights,” Mr Abdulai argues, “are indeed intrinsic to national
development.”
This postulation extends and refines the classical notion of governance
transparency. A famous statement attributed to the great Athenian states-
man Pericles (fifth-century B.C.E), for example, allowed that though
“only a few of us are capable of devising a policy or putting it into practice,
all of us are capable of judging it.” The philosopher Karl Popper (author
of The Open Society and its Enemies) objected that this statement “dis-
counts the notion of rule by the people, and even of popular initiative.
Both are replaced with the very different idea of judgment the people.”
Popper’s is a harsh, modern judgement, though an agreeable one.
ix
x FOREWORD
In his strong advocacy of openness and transparency, Mr Abdulai
assumes that the people making governance decisions constitute a govern-
ment by the people and for the people—a democracy. However, though
elections are critical to democracy, they are not a guarantor of good gov-
ernance. This requires transparency and accountability, fair play and open-
ness. Mr Abdulai’s overarching thesis is that without citizen access to
information relating to the decisions taken by their government, corrup-
tion will be rampant. Moreover, corruption is corrosive: it can lead to the
death of democracy. Even more than that, Mr Abdulai argues, it can lead
to the death of people, and he posits that corruption was the driving force
of Sierra Leone’s collapse into civil war in the 1990s. Had there been a
Freedom of Information Act and citizen access to governance informa-
tion, Mr Abdulai argues, the widespread corruption that impoverished the
country and threw its citizens into despair and nihilism would have been
prevented.
This is a somewhat comforting view, and one is grateful that it is stated
with great eloquence and conviction. Access to information, Mr Abdulai
writes, “ensures that people are aware of the decisions, and the motiva-
tions behind those decisions, of their governments and public authorities.
Only when citizens can enforce their rights to access information can they
verify that government and public authority actions were not motivated by
self-interest and were duly carried out for the welfare of society as a
whole.” Also: “If governments and public authorities know that citizens
do not have access to important information on the administration of the
state, then it is very easy for them to mislead the people on the efficacy of
their government by selectively releasing good news stories. This renders it
very difficult for citizens to properly assess governmental success and
therefore impedes their ability to use their right to vote effectively.”
Nevertheless, Mr Abdulai is no absolutist access to information. He
concedes, refreshingly, that information can be concealed or withheld on
legitimate national security grounds. Furthermore, in exploding the
“myth” that the passage of a Freedom of Information Act will overwhelm
public officials with a floodgate of often extraneous requests for access to
information, he concedes what is rarely discussed by advocates of access
to information. An overall lack of competence in using such law or per-
haps a certain public disinterest also contributes to government transpar-
ency. “For instance,” he writes, “although Liberia passed legislation in
2010 in similar terms to the Sierra Leonean RTAI [Right to Access to
Information] Act 2013, there have to date been few official requests in