"Human nature and bureaucratic incentives favour secrecy over openness,” wrote Fred­erick Schwarz Jr in his book Democracy in the Dark: The Seduction of Government Secrecy.

The struggle between secrecy and transparency in public governance has been going on for a long time. Bureaucracies realised at an early stage that keeping their conduct and operations out of

public purview served their interests the best, and hence promoted a culture of secrecy in state institutions.

However, things started to change with the advent of democratic ideals in the world. By definition, democracy is the ‘government of the people, by the people and for the people.’ As the people were the fountainhead of power, they were required to be well informed about the affairs of the state.

“It is a tenet of democracy that citizens should have full access to information, so they can make informed decisions about policies that affect their lives,” wrote Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner in their book Deceit and Denial. Thus, was born the demand for citizens’ Right to Information (RTI).

Although Pakistan became the first country in South Asia to enact Right To Information laws, its progress on them and its implementation of them have remained very poor. What is the reason for this and what can be done to make them a tool for good governance in the country?

Concept and Characteristics

The basic premise of the RTI is that, as the citizens pay for all the expenditures incurred by governments, including the salaries of state functionaries, they were the ‘masters’ and had the right to know what was being done by their government.

The fundamental objectives of the RTI have been to make governments, particularly bureaucracies, perpetually accountable for their deeds and misdeeds, to reduce corruption and inefficiency from their rank and file, and to ensure the greater participation of common people in the affairs of state — giving them power in accordance with the true spirit of democracy, ensuring human rights, promoting good governance and, ultimately, achieving social and economic growth.

As a nation, strikingly similar objectives were set for us by Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah. In the address he delivered on 11th August, 1947, he said: “One of the biggest curses… is bribery and corruption. That really is a poison. We must put that down with an iron hand… [Then, we have] this great evil, the evil of nepotism and jobbery. This evil… must be crushed relentlessly. I want to make it quite clear that I shall never tolerate any kind of jobbery, nepotism, or any influence.”

This is exactly what the RTI aims to do.

On another occasion, while addressing the government officers on 25th March, 1948, in Chittagong [then East Pakistan, now Bangladesh], Jinnah said: “You have to do your duty as servants... You do not belong to the ruling class; you belong to the servants. Make the people feel that you are their servants and friends; maintain the highest standards of honour, integrity, justice, and fairplay.”

These are precisely the virtues that RTI seeks in public functionaries in a state.

The Global Perspective

Sweden has the distinction of being the first country in the world to have passed RTI-related legislation, some 257 years ago, in 1766. Much later, in 1946, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) endorsed the RTI as a human right and reaffirmed it through Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948.

At present, about 125 countries in the world have enacted RTI legislations. A few years ago, the UN included RTI in the Sustainable Development Goals (SGD), under Goal 16, relating to “peace, justice and strong institutions.”

Among the countries that have made rapid strides in the realm of RTI — with some 1.6 million RTI requests in a year — is neighbouring India. It makes an interesting case study.

The demand for RTI in India emanated from the grassroots as an anti-corruption tool against corrupt government practices, aimed at safeguarding the socio-economic rights of the underprivileged classes. The birthplace of the RTI movement was Rajasthan, which had been hit hard by severe natural calamities. The government had launched several uplift schemes there with the promise of employing local workers to ease their economic tribulations.

However, it emerged that, in many cases, corrupt government officials, in collusion with contractors, manipulated the system and denied the workers their due wages through manipulating the records. This led to public protests throughout the state, under the aegis of the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS), which demanded that local administrators should provide them access to muster rolls, or record of the works done and the wages paid.

The government initially resisted, but finally gave way in view of persistent protests. Finally, when records were opened, it turned out that most of the information recorded in registers was false and fabricated. In many instances, the works shown to have been completed were actually never carried out. Sometimes, even long dead persons were shown to have been paid wages. This resulted in the naming and shaming of corrupt public officials and their nexus with corrupt contractors.

Such disclosures intensified a public demand for RTI, which was finally met in 2000 when the Rajasthan assembly passed the RTI legislation. This set the example, which was followed by other states as well as the central government in New Delhi over the next few years.

In just two decades, RTI legislation has brought in a “paradigm shift from a state-centric to a citizen-centric model of development,” writes Chetan Agrawal in Right to Information in India.

The Journey of RTI in Pakistan

Influenced by constant reports about corruption in official echelons in the country, Pakistan’s development partners and international financing institutions (IFC) had been persistently demanding the introduction of RTI laws. But its bureaucracy, very well entrenched in the colonial-era culture of secrecy, resisted all such moves.

However, when pressure became unbearable in January 1997, during the caretaker set-up, the president promulgated the Freedom of Information Ordinance (FOIO), making Pakistan the first country in South Asia to enact RTI laws.

From an international perspective, it was extremely weak legislation. But even that was not tolerated and the newly elected government, which took power in February 1997, conveniently allowed the FOIO to lapse on expiry of the four-month life of a presidential ordinance. This government itself came to an end in October 1999 and was replaced by a military dispensation led by President Musharraf.

Once again, the IFCs mounted pressure on the new government to reintroduce RTI laws in the country. Pakistan had to budge in view of its precarious financial condition and the need for dollars.

“Routinely ranked by TI [Transparency International] as one of the most corrupt countries in the world, Pakistan eventually agreed to adopt a Freedom of Information Ordinance in September 2002, as part of an anti-corruption programme promised in return for US$1.4 billion in aid from the IMF,” writes Alasdair Roberts in his wonderful book Blacked Out: Government Secrecy in the Information Age.

Under this law too, and the rules made thereunder in 2004, the procedure devised was made so cumbersome that many applicants lost their interest midway in the matter. In the meantime, the provinces too enacted their similar versions of the law. All these laws are collectively termed as ‘first generation RTI laws’ and are considered very poor in terms of international benchmarks.

The next phase of RTI laws’ journey began in 2010, when the parliament passed the 18th Constitutional Amendment, inserting Article 19A, which stated: “Every citizen shall have the right to have access to information in all matters of public importance, subject to regulation and reasonable restrictions imposed by law.”

It took Pakistan seven more years to enact a new version of the law, in the form of the Right of Access to Information Act 2017.

The RTI Laws

At present, there are five RTI laws operating in Pakistan: the federal (as stated above) and the four provincial laws, namely, the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Right to Information Act 2013; the Punjab Transparency and Right to Information Act 2013; the Sindh Transparency and Right to Information Act 2016; and the Balochistan Right to Information Act 2021.

All these laws are termed as ‘second-generation laws’. These laws meet most international benchmarks, though they still suffer from some weaknesses. In view of the constraints of space, here we shall only discuss the federal law.

Under this law, every citizen of Pakistan may seek information based on records from ‘public bodies’ which have been defined as all the federal ministries, divisions, attached departments, autonomous bodies, municipal and local authorities established

through a federal law, statutory corporations, body corporates, and the institutions set up, established, owned, controlled or even funded by the federal government.

The definition also includes the National Assembly and Senate, their members, secretariats and committees, and the courts, tribunals, commissions or boards established through federal law. The law also includes the non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in the definition of a ‘public body’, if they receive or have received, directly or indirectly, “public funds, subsidy, tax exemption, piece of land [plot etc], or any other benefit involving public funds” from the federal government. This gives the law quite a broad scope of operation.

The responsibility of ensuring compliance with the law in letter and spirit has been bestowed upon the “Principal Officer” in each organisation, who by definition are the respective federal secretaries in case of ministries and divisions and the head of all the other organisations. In addition, all public bodies are required to appoint an officer of grade 19 or above, as “designated official”, to facilitate the provision of records. In case the ‘designated official’ is not appointed, the ‘Principal Officer’ would discharge that duty.

The law defines the procedure of obtaining ‘record-based information’ in detail, fixing penalties on public servants in case of undue delay or denial. However, on the downside, the law provides a long list of exemptions. Ideally, the exemptions should be narrowly defined and kept brief, which is not the present case.

Another weakness relates to the “Information Commission”, which is the appellate forum for citizens, in case of non-provision of information or an unsatisfactory response from the concerned organisation. The law declares the prime minister as the appointing authority for all the three members of the Commission, instead of some neutral forum.

As the complaints filed with the Commission are invariably against one or the other public body working under the overall control of the prime minister, making him the authority is a clear case of conflict of interest. Additionally, the experience so far has been that prime ministers conveniently delay the appointment of the Commission, pulling the entire edifice of RTI laws to the ground.

The State of Implementation

Perhaps more important than the quality of a piece of legislation is the state of its implementation. On that count, Pakistan’s performance in RTI has been very poor.

There have been many factors responsible for it, the fundamental being that governments and public servants have yet not developed an ‘ownership’ of the initiative. It is largely treated as a compulsion imposed on them by international development partners, rather than in the interest of the country and its citizenry.

This is further aggravated due to people largely lacking awareness about this right, the weakness of civil society organisations, the bureaucracy’s centuries-old mindset of secrecy, obsolete methods of record-keeping and so on.

The question arises: how is one to improve this situation?

Actually, there are two sides to the RTI equation — the demand and the supply — and Pakistan would have to work on both sides to improve matters. At present, there is minimal demand for RTI from the citizens, which would have to be augmented through civil society interventions.

“The onus is on civil society to exploit the myriad tools for ensuring that the access to information laws on the statute books become living and functioning tools in the hands of those working against corruption and for human rights,” points out Helen Darbishire, an RTI activist based in Europe, in ‘Using the RTI as an Anti-corruption Tool’.

The tools to be employed in enhancing the demand for RTI include creating awareness and motivation among proactive segments of society, such as students, journalists, farmers, workers, shopkeepers etc, to ask questions from concerned agencies about the issues concerning them.

On the supply side too, we shall have to work on capacity-building of public servants about the law itself, on how to professionally handle RTI requests, to improve their record-keeping techniques and to equip them with better utilisation of information management systems.

From my personal experience of leading RTI sessions for senior officers at both the National Defence University in Islamabad and the National Institute of Management in Karachi, I can vouch for their forthcoming and forward-looking attitude, provided they are engaged in a positive manner, rather than just criticised.

We would have to understand that enforcing RTI, in its true sense, would bring Pakistan closer to the ideals set for us by the founder of the country. It would help a great deal in curing our longstanding ailments of corruption and misgovernance, paving Pakistan’s way towards its emergence as a developed country, enjoying respect in the comity of nations.

The writer has served as Faculty-Fellow/ Fulbright-Scholar on RTI/FOIA at American University in Washington DC, and consults on RTI.
He can be reached at ceo@rtic.com.pk

Published in Dawn, EOS, July 9th, 2023