By Emmanuel Udom
May 28,
2011, former Nigerian president, Dr
Goodluck Jonathan, signed the Freedom
of Information Act, 2011 into law. Olesegun
Obasanjo, the president of Nigeria before Jonathan bluntly refused to sign
the FOIA bill into law.
For his
boldness in signing the bill into law, Jonathan was hailed and praised within
and outside Nigeria as a president who was determined to open-up governance in
the country.
But, Edetaen Ojo, executive director,
Media Rights Agenda is quoted as saying that “the implementation of the FOIA
under the Jonathan administration was rather lackluster, with the presidency
itself consistently remaining among the worst performing institutions in terms
of non-compliance in all assessments conducted throughout the nearly four years
of the existence of the law”.
However, independent checks revealed
that in the four year second term of the Goodluck Jonathan regime, only two out
of the more than 800 federal institutions submitted their compliance reports on
the Freedom of Information Act 2011.
This is in flagrant
breach of Section 29 of the FOI Act, where only the then office of the
secretary to the government of the federation and that of the national security
adviser submitted their FOIA compliance reports in 2012 and 2014 respectively.
The refusal
by former president Jonathan to declare his assets publicly contributed also
contributed to this low non-compliance score-card.
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