Media Rights Agenda, a non-governmental, not for-profit organisation that promotes and protects media freedom and freedom of expression, has threatened to take legal action against every public institution undermining the effectiveness of the Freedom of Information Act.
The body had in 2017 launched FOI Hall of Shame where it lists public institution or official every week that undermines the act. So far, it has inducted over 68 public institutions and two high court judges into the list.
In a statement issued in Lagos, MRA’s programme manager for Freedom of Information, Ridwan
Sulaimon, said: “When we first launched the FOI Hall of Shame in 2017, the intention was to call
out public officials and institutions undermining the effectiveness of the FOI Act in the court of public opinion and thereby shame them into complying with the Act.
“We have since realised that the capacity for shame among most of our public institutions is unfortunately very limited as most of our public officials do not really care what citizens think of them.
It was for this reason that we suspended the initiative at the end of 2018 to re-evaluate our strategy.” According to Sulaimon, “The outcome of our assessment was that the first iteration of the Hall of Shame brought about only very modest improvements in the level of implementation of the FOI Act and compliance with its provisions by public institutions across the board.
Therefore, in addition to naming and shaming defaulting public institutions, we now propose to use the instrumentality of the Law and the judicial process to enforce compliance.”
Explaining some of the changes to the initiative, Sulaimon said: “This time around, MRA will
regularly undertake a rigorous assessment of every Federal public institution’s implementation
activities with regards to the FOI Act to establish how they are implementing the Act.
“Based on our findings from such assessments, every month, MRA will induct a public institution that is failing in its duties and obligations under the Act into the Hall of Shame. We will then follow this up with a law suit to compel that institution to comply with the provisions of the Act that it is in breach of.
