by Seyoum Hameso
Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely, according to conscience, above all liberty. Milton, Areopagitica, 1644.
In the 1990s, resulting from another round of undeclared wind of changes, modestly but differently comparable to that of 1960s, calls for freedom of information are steadily gaining currency in African socio-political landscape. These long overdue changes are overt manifestation of internal and external circumstances. Internally, quests for fair and just politico-economic systems were what underlay endless conflicts, riots, uprisings, coups d'état, and even so-called socialist revolutions across Africa. Externally, the end of Cold War presented opportunities and/or posed threats that, in the absence of ideological disguises, brought about or forced a seemingly unidirectional consensus on economic, political and social changes. The combined outcome of both internal and external factors indicate to the need for democratic transition (subverted in many cases), economic improvement (disillusioning, as it is) and freedom of information (the subject of this article) on all these vital aspects.
What is Freedom of Information?
Freedom of information is not esoteric reference, a term exclusive to the initiated. Broadly speaking, it includes the right to access of information and right to free expression of opinions, i.e. the right to freedom of speech and freedom to publish. As an overly quoted Article XIX of the UN describes, it is the right to freedom of opinion and expression to include 'freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers'.
(Relyea, 1983, Banjo, 1995). While the rights of access to information underpin unrestricted access to vital information, free expression relates to the right to freedom of speech and freedom to public. Some of these rights are also parts of fundamental human rights. In this context an overly quoted Article XIX of 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights describes the right to freedom of opinion and expression to include 'freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers'.
First of all, the context in which we discuss access to information or the politics of freedom of information is mainly related to a specific form of information, i.e. official information. Secondly, information or freedom of information is about people, for people. We must be cautious when we speak of freedom of information, it ought to involve, in some recognisable way, the majority of African societies. This means that in a situation where most people live in rural areas, issues of freedom of information need to reflect this reality. Moreover, freedom of information, or put simply the freedom to be informed and to inform, like other freedoms, cannot be merely donated like alms, or left to descend from blue skies; but that in any society, its prevalence underlies unflinching efforts by people ready, not only to fight for it and win it, but also to defend it. That is where the politics of freedom of information comes into play.
It is dismaying, however, to observe, until quite recently, that in contemporary Africa the manner in which silence has been maintained, the degree to which cynicism and feelings of resignation were allowed to prevail and subsequently apparent lack of productive debate as to what to do (the whole environment jammed by political censoring not only of ideas but also of institutions of ideas) gives room for despair. The borders of silence and a level of ignorance (that no amount of statistical indices could hope to capture) imposed on those people who are mindcuffed to think, handcuffed to write, handicapped to move and overpowered not to recreate their social culture is deeply disconcerting.
Freedom of information and Polity
The above conceptual definitions are related, directly or indirectly, to the polity and the 'laws' thereof. For example, in a totalitarian, one-party political regimes - too many to mention their name- the convention is that dissent is not tolerated; that freedom of expression is repressed; that people scarcely have access to right kind of official information. This stands in stark contrast to adoption and professed commitment by many regimes to UN and OUA charters and tantalising phrases on human rights. In many instances, such phrases remain on official statue books that are often destined to gather dust on shelves while citizens scarcely know what their governments are doing and, more importantly, why?
One reason is the lack of will to transform those rights from words to deeds. The other reason lies in the very nature of politics. In that, Africa has ample problems to grapple with and the most pressing one centres on the system (or lack of it) of authority relations. It is the prevalence, in one way or another, of ineffective and unresponsive regimes having patrimonial, personal rule at the
centre. That too has its own historical precedents. The political culture inherited from colonial states in much of Africa tended to be centralised, authoritarian, monoparty rule devoid of room for choice and participation. At times, these tendencies were endorsed by borrowed ideologies of state-activism, accompanied by misplaced policy emphasis and an equally misplaced perception of 'nation'-building. A less candid justification for state-activism was provided by the assumption that states were, in historical perspective, social guardians, sponsors of development, and national care-takers requiring autonomy and hence minimal dissent. Therefore, it seemed, for the promotion of social harmony, economic development and unity of a 'nation', that a typical post-colonial African state required something like ninety-nine-point-something per cent consensus. As argued elsewhere (Hameso, 1995), the critical bases (such as, the stark realities of Africa's social diversity, political incongruity and economic inequity) for some of the above objectives were nebulous, suspicious and self-serving. It only became apparent to post-colonial generations in Africa now that such states happen to develop underdevelopment, harness national or ethnic conflict; and that while destroying genuine nations, Africa's non-nation states went on building a failure of monumental proportions.
Given this background, it is no wonder then that in a political system that breeds ignorance, oppression, poverty and disease, any idea of economic development remains peripheral. With this peripheral intention, superimposed states sought to crush an otherwise legitimate voices of dissent and subverted causes that appeared to be contrary to overriding interests of a handful of ruling cliques who are sheltered in the political kingdom.
The question now remains: How this sort of polity fits into a concept of freedom of information? In a continent where misgovernment is popularly viewed as a main problem leading to economic crises, the urgency for freedom of information about government and public accountability cannot be
over-emphasised. Today, more than any other time, the needs for free flow of news and views, or for a kind of glasnost are apparent in Africa as they were in Soviet Russia.
Why is freedom information necessary and important?
Information has always been a basis for knowledge; and the latter is power. Lack of information contributes to knowledge deficiency both leading to powerlessness. Freedom of informations in that sense implies a form of empowerment or better still, it signifies freedom from ignorance, from servitude and ultimately freedom to choose. An informed person is empowered person. Take a hypothetical case of where two people where one is well versed of what one needs, what one expects and what is expected of one, the other dazzled, daunted, confused and therefore inarticulate. A mean-spirited social good that might come from the latter, the sense of helplessness one feels in the face of unruly ruling cliques and reproduction of last class citizenry are appalling scenarios.
The stark reality in Africa today, as it was in remote past, is that most Africans go to a great length, particularly women and children on foot to fetch water; to health centres for medical treatment and to schools for education. Most live in remote rural areas where there are barely enough all-weather roads, without access to electricity (alas, a basic requisite for tools for information technology) despite massive water resources. Quite often, access to pure water itself is not always easy. As a matter of fact, life in contemporary rural Africa is a backbreaking struggle for survival where atomised individuals and fragmented communities do despair lacking the power to do anything of influence nor of consequence. It is a situation whereby societies ready themselves for a life of desperation in chilling silence enforced by state and equally chilling ignorance reinforced by lack of information about the state. Difficult to come by is access to information that affects their ability to survive and to that which enables them to take decisions for action. Overwhelmed, as they are by ignorance, they have no means to articulate their predicament.
How relevant is, therefore, the issue of freedom of information to the African poor? The answer is simple. Just as information, or freedom of information, is useful to post-modernist society, it is equally vital for rural African societies that account for more than seventy percent of the whole population in most of the countries. The need for public and private provision of information is necessary and useful. Conventional meteorological services, for instance, would be of tremendous help in providing weather forecasts while early warning systems provide a means of preparation for action in case of natural disasters. Moreover, dissemination of information as to matters that directly affect the livelihood of people, say health, education, basic product prices, government policies are as just indispensable. Providing access to how best to use technology essentially through education is always vital. These are constraints that any learned debate should take note of when it comes to African discourse. In this and other areas, lack of freedom to provide information, unfortunately, is what characterises much of Africa.
How could freedom of information be ensured? It requires, inter
alia,
1. Open and accountable government,
2. Healthy mass media, and
3. Informed, responsive public.
Open and accountable government: A lot has been said about virtues of transparency and accountability of government though both concepts remained problematic. Transparency, in particular, reflects the degree to which the rights and wrongs of political kingdoms become visible to the governed. Under situations where freedom of information is resisted and where politics are not transparent, social evils such as corruption, abuse of power and violation of fundamental human rights cannot be exposed, and perhaps, will never be rectified. Lest such wrongs are corrected, the political kingdom in Africa would remain an abomination, deeply uncomfortable to anyone involved in it and to all it captures. But it hardly occurs to those uncomfortably perched on the edge of Africa's political kingdoms that knowledge is safer than fear of the unknown, information is better than ignorance and that, even, too much speech is better than unduly censored conscience. Securing accountability and freedom of information would be a partial way to go around this problem.
A healthy media is another requirement as far as freedom of information is concerned. In strict sense, mass media includes the radio, television and newspapers and other medium of communication. In Africa how healthy the media is depends on a number of factors such as laws relating to general freedom of speech and expression and on rules and regulations affecting provision of media information. It also depends on the degree of independence and/or controls on broadcasting and publishing institutions.
The role of the healthy media is summarised as ensuring that the 'public have access, on a continuing basis, to have a wide range of facts, opinions and comments, and they provide a forum for the exercise of the public's right to be informed and to express opinion about matters of public interest… (Banjo, 1995). How effectively and freely the mass media (state owned and controlled and/or independent) are performing these tasks? The likely reply would be 'not much' since it is not uncommon to observe views aimed at justifying banning and curbing freedom of press. One such case was unabashedly made by an official who argued that 'in developing countries we cannot have a freewheeling press. It might be too deceptive and people would get too excited. People have not yet developed the critical sense to judge stories without being unduly influenced or distracted.' (in UK Press Gazette, 12 May, 1986). Such is a degree of paternalism that one remains puzzled how and when enlightenment is going to be achieved and more importantly, how people's critical judgement would develop while they are condemned to ignorance perpetuated by
self-aggrandising ruling cliques and their propaganda through single, state-controlled radio and television, and to the only 'national' newspaper, and the only 'national' book that sometimes disseminates untruth and mistruth.
This protest should not blind us, however, to the possibility that a free press could be biased towards the current distribution of power and privilege. It also the case that an entirely unregulated media may take power without responsibility. But this cannot and should not provide ammunition to those wedded to centralised and controlled media. For long, it has remained the raison d'être for governments to stifle the flow of information, arrest freedom of information and its messengers. To that end, stifling are the laws relating to information in many African countries. These include decrees, rules and procedures relating to censorship, access to official documents, advertisement licenses, and allocation of electronic media frequencies. For example, in post-Apartheid South Africa, the legacy of oppressive censorship laws is said to have left 'information poverty' and 'book famine' while in Nigeria pretty little else is free as mere call for mundane political right invites
apostacy. In Ethiopia, for almost two brutally long decades, Mengistu's military derg junta controlled, centralised and censored newspapers, radio and TV broadcasts, magazines, books, music, and anything that would possibly be suspected of conveying any message other than a single noise (often official
dis-information) from the only leader, the only party and the only vampire-cum-'motherland' and by the only language in the lands. This typical of Orwell's thought control process engendered something like black market activity on information needs whereby people with access to modern technology resorted to external radio broadcasts and print media for relatively trustworthy and useful information of public concern. That sort of Newspeak lingua franca is still persisting long after Mengistu; in fact, now being pursued more vigorously and at times subtly with cosmetic changes to news management and programmed distribution of disinformation outside a radius of dozen kilometres from Addis Ababa, the capital, where most of the people are more unequal than others.
Elsewhere in Africa, the record of media freedom ranges between severe censorship to benign restrictions. As a recent study published for Article 19 shows, in situations of widespread poverty and illiteracy, some forms of information media such as television, newspapers, books are simply inaccessible to the majority of Africans. This leaves radio as the most potent source second only to the word of mouth (by far the biggest and archetypal African way of imparting information). The radio medium, in itself, is fraught with problems. It is only rare to find independent radio broadcasting service with impartial, critical and objective information provision. In Rwanda, a nominally independent, quasi-private broadcasting service of
Radio-Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) was alleged to air insidious information inciting popular violence against some sections of society. Thus, in a number of cases, the radio medium remains monopoly of state broadcasting corporations. The same report hails South Africa and Namibia as having 'effective legal guarantees of the independent of national broadcasting corporation' (Article 19). Where private radio broadcasting is functional, it is that either licenses were granted to individuals with close connection to governments (cases were cited from Uganda and Zambia) or its editorial independence is vague. Recommendable, therefore, is the need for an independent body that overseas public service broadcasting as well as creation of legal and economic climate conducive to freedom of expression and pluralistic broadcasting.
Responsive and informed society is another insurance to achieve and maintain freedom of information. In general, a responsive public with access to information is known to have engaged in informed debate, made critical choices, contributed to policy formulation and ensured transparency and accountability on the part of governments and their bureaucracies (Banjo, 1995). In effect, all these reinforce each other and while they are everyday reality in the West, some of the ingredients are not yet born or stillborn in parts of Africa. It is a situation where optimism and pessimism co-exist side by side until such a time that we wake up to hard reality.
Reality or otherwise, a pragmatist might ask: How could freedom of information be secured when those who had a chance to inform are mindcuffed and handcuffed, when books are banned like Ngugi's Mathigari in Kenya and Be'alu Girma's Oromay in Ethiopia once were; writers and thinkers disappearing, some into oblivion, some into exile and others just disappear? How can freedom of the sorts could be assured under ubiquitous decrees that stifle both access and the means of obtaining information, when professional journalists are harassed by authorities about the sources of their information, when publications are seized, and when the outside world does not tend to hear (or care) about what is going on, until it is too late, like it was in Somalia and Rwanda?
Consequences of Lack of Freedom of Information
Who looses by lack of freedom of information? This writer would like to suggest that ultimately everybody does. That the damage done by lack of information would be exceedingly harmful when it is thought it could have been averted. The catalogue of losers, first and foremost, involves society. A certain test by which we judge whether there is freedom, in general, and freedom of information, in particular, prevails in any society is by the degree to which dissent is tolerated, that opposition and its expression enables learned debate instead of inviting apostasy. By lack of freedom, the losers would be both current generations and posterity. In strict sense of the word, it is often the case that, under African circumstances, rural societies are ones who suffer most from lack of freedom of information. The information gap only exacerbates an already prevailing disparity (in terms of health and education facilities, pure water, electricity, access to libraries and books and media) between a handful of urban centres and vast rural societies.
Lack of freedom of information affects not just the society but also the polity. Since, there are no polls to indicate the regime popularity and that of their policies, political leaders could hardly know approval or disapproval of themselves and their policies. In the absence of this, they solely rely on self-deception of highly stage-managed annual 'national' parades that are given to misinform than inform. Alternative dependence on sycophants is equally dangerous as Chinua Achebe once remarked that one of the penalties of exalted power is loneliness since, harnessed, as they are, to the trappings of protocol and blockaded by a buffer of grinning courtiers and sycophants, even a good and intelligent leaders will gradually begin to forget what the real world looks like. Seen in that façade, exalted, lonely, and blockaded, such leaders would be one of the most misinformed! Misinformed or not, no remark could better remind the leaders than one from Bishop Desmond Tutu:
It is true, God's children in Africa suffer because there is less freedom in their countries than during the colonial times. African leaders need to be reminded that there is totalitarianism and despotism nearly everywhere in Africa. When your people are free, you can also walk freely and you will not need huge security to protect you. (quoted in Index on censorship, 1990)
It remains to us to add that, as long as the incumbent leaders keep 'their' people prisoners, they too, remain in the company of prisons being in no way better off than a sentry of the Gulag Archipelagos.
Conclusions
In yet another age of revolution, that of information revolution, questions of freedom of information and commitment to principle of allowing access to information remain fundamental issues especially with reference to information that affects the ability for people to be informed, take decisions and action in society. Denial of these rights should count as but part and parcel of infringement on human rights.
The freedom to know, to utter, and to argue freely, according to conscience as Milton demanded three and half centuries ago, are exactly as practical today not only in Africa but almost everywhere. What makes demands for these rights more sharp in Africa is the overriding current reality both within and without that continent.
References
Achebe, C. (1983) The Trouble with Nigeria. London:
Heineman.
Article 19 (1990) Index on Censorship, July.
----- (1995) Article XIX Bulletin, 21, Jan/Feb 1995.
Banjo, G. (1995 'Freedom of Information in Nigeria', in Turfan B. et al (eds.) Emerging Democracies and Freedom of Information. London: LA Publishing.
Bowden, R. (1995) 'Keynote Address: Emerging Democracies and Freedom of Information', in Turfan B. et al (eds.). Emerging Democracies and Freedom of Information. London: LA Publishing.
Durrani, S. (1993) 'The Right t0 Publish', Focus on International and Comparative Librariainship. 24 (2) 1993. 74-86.
Hameso, S. (1995) Economic Development, State and Society in Africa, Forthcoming.
Merret, C. (1992) 'Freedom of Information and Expression in time "New" South Africa', Focus on International and Comparative Librariainship, 23 (3) 1992, 91-100.
Riley, T. & Relyea, H. (eds.) (1983) Freedom Information: Trends in Information age. London: Frank Cass.
This article was published in Focus on International and Comparative Librarianship, Vol. 26. No. 3. pp.156-164, 1995.
