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PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA
Oath Of Secrecy, FOI Bill And Pressmen
Predictably the oath of secrecy that the personal staff in the presidency swore to recently at the instance of President Umaru Yar’adua himself has provoked much public outrage. Coming so soon after he went AWOL (absent without official leave) for nearly three weeks, people are shocked that instead of giving the public the explanation for his disappearance to which they are entitled, he has decided to barricade himself even more behind a wall of enforced silence from his staff and those of his deputy.
The oath of secrecy sworn to by all the president’s men may have been unprecedented – as the Chief Press Secretary of General Abdulsalami Abubakar, I did not swear to any oath of secrecy and until last month I don’t know that any presidential staff ever did - but the oath itself for certain categories of public officers is nothing new. As Barrister Aliyu Umaru, a former Solicitor-General of Kaduna State, told Daily Trust the other day, such oaths are routine stuff in the civil service. Any official with frequent and regular access to sensitive government information is required to swear an oath to keep government’s secrets secret.
There is, however, a difference between what happened in the presidency last month and such routine oaths of secrecy. First, they are not administered by a judge. Instead they are done by signing pro-forma statements of oath. Second, they are not conducted with such pomp as was displayed in the Villa and third they are not universal, involving as they did in the presidential case, even cooks and drivers, sensitive as their jobs may be.
In short, what was wrong with the oath of secrecy by the president’s men – and women – was not so much the oath itself, unprecedented as it was. What was wrong were the motive and the style.
The motive clearly is to keep the public in the dark about the president’s health. In that case they needed not have bothered. Anyone with half an eye can see that the man is not exactly as fit as fiddle. However, even if the oath succeeds in keeping people in the dark as to the precise nature of the president’s ill health, the flip side is that it will invariably trigger – indeed it already has - a malicious rumour mill about his health which is more dangerous to the state of the nation than his ill-health.
One sign of this is the conclusion, already widespread among people and the media, that the president was never really in favour of the Freedom of Information Bill that has been in a legislative limbo the past nine years or so. Not a few readers reacting to my article on his health on these pages penultimate Wednesday said, in the wake of the oaths, Nigerians, journalists in particular, might as well kiss the FOI bill goodbye.
Such conclusions betray exaggerated fear of the potency of oath of secrecy in damming the flow of public information. It equally betrays a certain illusion among journalists and laymen alike about the power of a FOI bill in making government transparent and accountable.
Probably the most secretive presidency the Americas have ever seen is George Bush’s. So paranoid has his presidency been about its secrets that it has often denied Congress routine information it needs to carry out its oversight functions. And Bush’s Vice, Dick Cheney, has since earned himself a terrible reputation as a grand master at stonewalling any request for even the most innocuous information.
Yet Bush’s presidency has hardly been any more successful in keeping its secrets secret than more liberal presidencies before his. Certainly few presidencies have suffered from the problem of kiss and tell than Bush’s, gauging from the books that have been written by disillusioned ex-staff about the mendacity of his presidency.
The lesson here is obvious; oaths of secrecy are like idiot laws – they are pointless and futile because they are hardly enforceable.
However, just as oaths of secrecy are exercises in futility, a FOI law as a weapon for making government transparent and accountable has its limitations. As with most things, the devil in a FOI law is in its details. The FOI bill that the National Assembly passed towards the end of its second term last year but which President Obasanjo refused to sign, harboured enough devils to make access to public information not as easy as most of us imagine it can. Still it was better than no FOI law at all, if only because half bread is better than none.
However, the FOI bill that has now been revisited by the National Assembly is worse than useless because an amendment of the one Obasanjo refused to sign has now shifted the burden of proving that the release of any information will not harm the public on journalists. In the old bill, the onus was to have been on government officials to prove that such release would harm the public interest.
Unlike many of my journalist colleagues I do not believe a FOI law is the mojo that will open the doors that shut out goings on in government from the public eye. The right type of FOI law will be useful and helpful but, as the history of journalism everywhere, Nigeria inclusive, has shown, a determined and committed journalist will always get the information the public needs to hold their governments accountable, oaths of secrecy or no oaths of secrecy, FOI law or no FOI law.
People, including public officials, will always have all sorts of motives, honourable or otherwise, to spill the beans. It is up to a journalist to examine those motives and examine the facts and then decide whether or not it is in the best interest of the public to publish and be damned.
If he is sincere and committed he will get it right on sufficient number of times to become trusted by the public.
So if the presidency’s oath of secrecy and the reluctance of the National Assembly to enact a FOI law pose any danger to the practice of journalism at all, it is not that they can stop any journalist worth the name from doing his job. They may make things more difficult but that's all they can do. The danger is that they might tempt journalists into becoming so cynical about government that they will be quick to publish every gossip making the rounds of the rumour mills before they have done enough check on it to confirm its accuracy.
Needless to say it is a temptation that journalists and laymen alike must resist all the time.
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