Parliament must do the needful on ATI

So, it has finally pleased the Peter Mutharika administration to clear the Access to Information (ATI) Bill for parliamentary debate!

Well, congratulations are in order I guess to government and those, including yours truly, that are campaigning heavily for the proposed law. I am looking forward to seeing the Bill on the order paper during the Budget Review Meeting of Parliament where it should be enacted without being “adulterated” or trying to align to the thinking of the Executive.

ATI has been an outstanding issue since 1994 after our democratic Republican Constitution, in its Section 37, stated that “Every person shall have the right of access to all information held by the State or any of its organs at any level of government in so far as such information is required for the exercise of his [or her] rights.”

So, yes, this is some sort of good news in that we, the people, through our members of Parliament (MPs), can debate this draft law.

The acknowledgement for progress notwithstanding, one also appreciates the cautious, if not lukewarm, response to the Cabinet decision from leading campaigners of this legislation.

The Media Institute of Southern Africa (Misa-Malawi Chapter) and the Media Council of Malawi (MCM) aren’t too enthusiastic and won’t commit their positions until they see the Bill and/or any changes that may have been made to it, especially considering that the consultations President Mutharika promised after rejecting the version sent to him do not appear to have taken place.

Said MCM chairperson Wiseman Chijere Chirwa, a professor at Chancellor College, a constituent college of the University of Malawi (Unima): “I will not go about celebrating before I have seen what is in it because we had actually made very specific requests and if there is not what we expect then there will be no reason for celebration, so let them make it public first.”

Misa Malawi has a similar position—with good reason. Mutharika initially kicked the Bill out of Cabinet simply because there were certain things he did not like. He called them inconsistencies, but there has not been clarity on what specifically those are.

Mention has been made of the administration trying to restrict accessible information only to that which comes after the Bill has been gazetted into law.

But such a caveat would make the Bill useless. As they say, past is prologue. How would the current information be relevant without looking at its historical trend? This is one of the concerns that stakeholders are worried about.

Then there is this issue of government deliberately projecting this Bill as being for the media. There were traces of this view during an interview this week to confirm the Cabinet decision when Minister of Justice and Constitutional Affairs Samuel Tembenu: “It is true Cabinet has approved the Bill. You wanted it and we have given it to you. You will now be able to access public information very easily because we have put in place proper legal framework and I hope we will have a systematic way of providing information to the public; that all the systems will be put in place for easy access to that information.”

“You wanted it and we have given it to you!” I interpret the “you” to mean the media. While Section 36 of the Constitution is also concerned with the media, this law is not for journalists alone.

This is not Tembenu’s law to give. This law is the right of citizens and rights are given by God, not a Head of State, let alone a Cabinet minister.

That said, there is still strong reason for optimism.

My prayer is that even if the Mutharika Cabinet were to gazette an “adulterated” version of the Bill, we will still get to know about it because it will have to be made public anyway as part of the enactment process.

There will be time to look at the Bill and sniff out anything that corrupts it. There will have to be hard work in lobbying MPs and other influential groups to ensure that we get as close to the language we want as possible without compromising too much of the law’s letter and spirit—or our democratic values. And the MPs, as servants of Parliament, which provides checks and balances to the Executive, should not allow Mutharika and his Cabinet to get away with an ineffective law if, that is, the Executive has watered it down.