By: Emmanuel Oti Acheampong
The Information Minister and Member of Parliament for Ofoase-Ayirebi Constituency, Kojo Oppong Nkrumah has bared it openly that one key challenge undermining the compliance and success of the Right To Information Law (RTI) is the institutional culture of silence.
The Right to Information Law is currently in its third successive year after its implementation. The law which took over two decades to see light empowers people to exercise their rights to seek information on the proceedings and operations of an organization receiving public resources or working in the interest of the state.
In an opening speech at the Public Forum on implementation of the law on December 13, 2023, in Accra, the Information Minister mentioned that the behavioral change challenge affects public institution’s full embrace of the law.
This, the information Minister said, is due to the norm of getting used to working within a certain culture of secrecy.
He noted the challenge of the ignorance of the law and sometimes deliberate refusal by public agencies to provide information because they feel it might embarrass them is leading to difficulties implementing the law.
Mr. Oppong Nkrumah also touched on the delay in the passage of the legislative instrument as another challenge facing the implementation of the law. He said the Legislative Instrument is a crucial accompaniment to the law and it provides details about the nuances of it and facilitates its implementation.
He added that without the Legal Instrument, certain aspects of the law are still difficult to implement.
“The absence of the LI has led to some challenges in some areas, as the ambiguities in some parts of the law regarding for example, the number of days in processing the initial information request, or even the period within which reviews by the Commission should respond to are matters that are yet to be sorted out”, he said.
The Information Minister outlined the reasons for their inability to roll out fully all the information units across all public institutions to lack of resources. He said the Commission has not been able to populate all public institutions with information officers due to financial resource constraints.
He further added that the challenges the implementation of the law has met, forms a great cause for his ministry to work with the Access to Information Department (ATI) of the Information Service Department (ISD) to put in place measures to address it using technology.
