Workshop calls for FOI Centers at Local Government Councils

Participants at a Freedom of Information workshop for grassroots organizations have called for Local Information Centers to be established at Local Government levels to ensure effective implementation when the Freedom of Information Bill is eventually passed into law. 

They also suggested that community based organisations (CBOs) should play a central role in the effective implementation of the proposed law by building an efficient network to act as link between rural communities and the information centers.  It is only in this way, they said, that the law can be effectively enforced.

About 40 participants drawn from various grassroots and community based organizations gathered at Gombe Jewel Hotel, Kaduna on December 19, 2005 for the FOI enlightenment campaign aimed at broadening the constituency for support for the Bill.

The workshop, the third in the series of grassroots workshops on freedom of information, was organized by the Media Rights Agenda (MRA), in collaboration with Connecting Gender for Development (COGEN), with support from the European Union (EU).

Organizations represented at the one-day workshop include: Center for Children and Women Intervention Programme, Kabyayang Widows Association, Mayatti Allah, Naomi Widows Group, Mother Care Forum, Women Development Organisation, Society for the Restoration of Human Dignity, Aid Foundation Barnawa, Kawo Women Development Association, Kawo Youth Association, Media and Development Project, ALFACARI Organisation, Poverty Alleviation Development Center, Adolescent and Youth Awareness Team, STD/AIDS Awareness and Prevention, Federation of Moslem Women, Kaduna branch, and Abantu for Development.

Other organizations are: Northern Youth Consultative Forum, Helping Hand Network, Rural Women and Youth Empowerment Programme, Children Information Network, Reube Fulbe Development Association, Himma Dramatic Club, Association for Adolescent Reproductive Health Action, Love and Compassion Ministry, and Christian Association of Nigeria.

In his opening remarks, Mr. Tive Denedo, the Campaigns Director of Media Rights Agenda and coordinator of the workshop, told participants that the journey towards making Nigeria a better place had taken a huge step forward with the entrance of the Freedom of Information Bill into the National Assembly in 1999.  He said the debate is getting more robust by the day and that the era of secrecy and arbitrariness in government will soon be over.

Also speaking on the importance of the Bill, Ms Ngukwase Surma, the Executive Director of Connecting Gender for Development, described the Bill as a mechanism that will allow the voice of the average Nigerians to be heard and also afford them the rare and unique opportunity of contributing to the governance process.

She said: “It is like giving you a chance to participate in the Board meetings of the Kaduna Polytechnic.  It will be a wonderful experience.”

Participants demonstrated their enthusiasm for the Freedom of Information Bill by spending their breaks periods sending text messages on their mobile phones to Senators, urging them to support passage of the Bill, which was to come up for the third reading at the Senate the next day.

The participants suggested that when the Bill is passed, it should use the bottom-up approach to avoid the plague of non-implementation which has befallen a lot of other laws due to concentration of all efforts at the Federal level to the neglect of the grassroots.

They also resolved that Local Council offices should be the circulation point for the law when translated into local languages. They premised this resolution on the general belief among them that the National Human Rights Commission, the proposed administrative body for the implementation of the law, could not be effective if it was solely responsible for getting the law across the federation to all stakeholders.

Participants at a similar workshop for grassroots and community-based organizations in the Niger-Delta region held in Port Harcourt on December 5, 2005, had called for the translation of the proposed law into local languages to make it more accessible to rural dwellers.

The Kaduna workshop participants suggested that CBOs be empowered to get the rural people to embrace the message of legal access to information held by government and called for the use of local media of communication within rural communities to spread the message of the proposed law.

This, they said, will ensure that information which will play a vital role in the lives of the people get to them on time instead of relying on the mass media which are currently too elitist in structure and hardly get information to rural communities.

The participants were optimistic that the impact of the Freedom of Information bill would be felt most in the years ahead and also recommended that youths be empowered through awareness campaigns to imbibe the principles of democracy and the content of the law.