The Speaker of Parliament, Prof. Mike Oquaye, has said the Right to Information Bill will be more meaningful if it goes beyond dealing with the public sector to include the private sector.
The Speaker says making access to information from the public sector mandatory through the passage of the Bill without including private businesses, will lead nowhere.
In Prof. Oquaye’s view, state officials suspected to be corrupt usually have links to the private sector.
“I was not happy, particularly with one aspect. That is, information can only be compelled from the public service, but that private businesses, foreign companies and others cannot be compelled. I said: but there is a symbiosis between corruption, corrupt officials and the businesses they do business with, and increase contracts by 10, 20, 30 percent.”
“I would suggest publicly that it must encompass everybody; the private sector, the public sector, the business promoters, the business consultants and those people who have some very interesting titles but who themselves are the real promoters of corrupt practices. For those persons, the Right to Information Bill must stretch to all of them before it can really be meaningful,” Prof. Oquaye said.
Background of RTI Bill
The RTI Bill,which is expected to make information easily accessible by the media and Ghanaians to boost the fight against corruption, has been in legislation for well over 17 years now because successive governments have failed to implement it despite several assurances.
Efforts by several advocacy groups to put pressure on the duty bearers to have the bill passed have also not yielded any positive results.
At his last address to Parliament, outgoing President John Mahama begged Parliament to pass the bill at the last minute but his call was ignored.
Although the incumbent New Patriotic Party (NPP) government has promised to pass the bill, it is unclear how soon that would be.
Cabinet yet to hold talks on RTI bill – Hamid
Information Minister, Mustapha Hamid, in January 2018 claimed that Cabinet had not held discussionson the RTI bill.
“Cabinet has proposed to have a special session to look at this particular bill because of the importance that it has before we then pass it and take it to Parliament…The bill is before Cabinet. It will be discussed. If you ask me when, I will not be able to say, but I am sure pretty soon the Cabinet Secretary will get a day when the entire Cabinet will retreat in order to look at this bill properly and then when we have a final consensus on it, we can then take it to Parliament,” he added.
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By: Zoe Abu Baidoo/citifmonline.com/Ghana