POLITICAL CAPITAL 1: Freedom of Information

Thursday, 12 August 2010 00:00

Written by Malou Tiquia

With an 88% approval rating and an 85% trust rating, PBSA3 could have set the trains in the right direction by using his political capital on building Open Government. Open Government is nothing new. Wikipedia defines it as "the governing doctrine which holds that the business of government and state administration should be opened at all levels to effective public scrutiny and oversight. In its broadest construction it opposes reason of state and national security considerations, which have tended to legitimize extensive state secrecy."

Crucial to the principle of Open Government is freedom of information (FOI), which is nowhere in PBSA3’s Inaugural last June 30 and SONA last July 26. He was and still is totally silent about the FOI bill. And yet last August 16, it was virally spread in the FB and Twitter land that the new website of the Office of the President is up supposedly to get feedback from the people. Polls left and right bloomed asking about the website and yet they missed the train by a mile.

You use the social media if the regime is open, truly open. With social media, the framework of Listen-Participate-Transform should be adopted. Pretending to have the tools to show there are openness, transparency and accountability is really just another propaganda.

I recall that when candidate Noynoy Aquino ran for the presidency, mention was made that his governance style will be open, transparent and accountable. And so we ask the following questions: why are systems still closed? Why cant public servants take to heart the 15-day period provided by the Ethical Standards Law on the time provided to respond to queries and requests? Why can’t the appointments made by PBSA3 be posted in the so-called Tito Noy site so that people can start knowing the appointees and being vigilant about their actuations in public, which after all is good citizenship? Even a directory of who does what in Malacanang is still non-existent, but these are the same issues raised against Arroyo. Better to guess than inform.

On the other side of town, do you know that to secure a copy of the resumes of Members of the 15th Congress, you will have to write a letter to each of the 236 Congressmen? That you just can’t go around the House of Representatives and do door-to-door handing out letters? And that is not even asking for the SALN. Moral of the story, don’t ask permission because they might just invite you to a sudden Q&A by the Legal Section of the House.

Open government is a key hallmark of contemporary democratic practice and is often linked to the passing of freedom of information legislation. The US passed its Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in 1966, Denmark and Norway passed theirs in 1970, France and The Netherlands in 1978, Australia, Canada and New Zealand in 1982, Hungary in 1992, Ireland and Thailand in 1997, South Korea in 1998, the United Kingdom in 2000, Japan and Mexico in 2002 and Germany in 2005. Scandinavian countries, however, have a claim to have adopted this agenda even before the USA passed its 1966 FOIA: Sweden dating the origins of its modern provisions to the eighteenth century and Finland continuing the presumption of openness after gaining independence in 1917, passing its Act on Publicity of Official Documents in 1951.

Is BSA3 supportive of open source governance then? If so, how come FOI is no longer a priority? With such a huge political capital, BSA3 can actually get legislation out in one year and then go to town and say I have done my campaign promises and provided the policy environment to defeat in our generation one sore problem facing us today: abject poverty.

If only BSA3 truly adapts to a political philosophy of open source governance “which advocates the application of the philosophies of the open source and open content movements to democratic principles in order to enable any interested citizen to add to the creation of policy and commenting on a program. Legislation and program implementation is democratically opened to the general citizenry, allowing policy development to benefit from the collected wisdom of the people as a whole.” That should have been “tuwid na daan.”

With FOI, BSA3 can probably study the Ficha Limpa law recently passed in the Brazilian Congress. The law bars politicians with criminal records from running for public office. Then we can say, change indeed has come.

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