Secrecy Cannot Wear the Robe of Good Governance

OUR OLD PEOPLE say you cannot hide a pregnancy with your hand. The Boakai administration declared October the Month of Good Governance, and its own Governance Commission gathered stakeholders at the EJS Ministerial Complex under a theme promising accountability, transparency and citizens’ participation. Yet in the same season, civil servants across the country are being made to sign a Confidentiality and Non-Disclosure Agreement that, by the account of the Press Union of Liberia (PUL), threatens to turn the Freedom of Information Act into a dead letter. A government cannot preach openness from the pulpit and lock the church door behind it.

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PUL PRESIDENT JULIUS Kanubah said it plainly, and he said it at the Commission’s own forum on Friday. The non-disclosure policy, he argued, strips the Independent Information Commission (IIC) of its statutory authority, undermines the lawmaking function of the Legislature, reintroduces state secrecy and effectively recriminalizes the disclosure of public information by government workers. He noted that the IIC, the very body the law created to enforce the FOI Act, opposed the policy. That alone should have stopped the Civil Service Agency (CSA) in its tracks. When the referee blows the whistle, the players do not keep running with the ball.

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WE DO NOT wave away the government’s stated reasons. When it rolled out the agreement earlier this year, the CSA said it manages sensitive payroll and personal records for more than 60,000 employees and needed to protect them. Every serious government guards personnel files, medical records, security plans and the private data of its citizens. Nobody at THE ANALYST is asking a clerk to post a colleague’s salary slip on Facebook. That is not the question. The question is whether a blanket agreement, signed under threat of removal from payroll and dismissal, now padlocks information the law says belongs to the people.

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LIBERIA ALREADY HAS rules for genuine secrets. The FOI Act itself carries exemptions for national security, personal privacy and other legitimately sensitive matters. If the law already protects the few things that must be protected, then a new contract laid over every civil servant adds only one thing. It frightens the honest worker who sees money going wrong and wants to tell somebody.

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THINK OF THE nurse at a county hospital who watches drugs walk out of the storeroom. Think of the accountant at a ministry who sees a contract priced at three times what the market charges. Think of the clerk who knows the school feeding money never reached the children in Sinoe or Grand Gedeh. Under this agreement, each of them must now weigh conscience against livelihood. Many will choose to feed their families, and the public will never know.

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THIS IS NOT THEORY. Kanubah’s own figures show how fragile access to information already is. By the IIC’s audit, 78 of 103 assessed ministries and agencies have not even appointed Public Information Officers. Of 104 requests filed by journalists under one donor-supported program, fewer than five were answered within 90 days. The IIC, the dog that is supposed to bark, has been evicted over unpaid rent and pushed into a basement without electricity. A government serious about transparency would be filling these holes. Instead, it is digging a new one.

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THE TIMING SHARPENS the contradiction. This very week, a Nimba lawmaker stood in the House of Representatives with receipts in hand, questioning how money for cattle, seed rice and fertilizer was spent at the Ministry of Agriculture. Whatever the truth of those claims, and the minister has called them false, the debate is possible only because contract documents, some of which the minister himself concedes are genuine, reached a lawmaker’s hands. That is how accountability breathes in a young democracy. Paper travels from inside government to the people whose job is to ask questions. Gag the inside, and the questions dry up.

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THE GOVERNANCE COMMISSION must also find its voice. Kanubah called its silence conspicuous and self-defeating, and we agree. A commission charged with promoting good governance cannot host a dialogue on the FOI Act while saying nothing about the most direct threat that law has faced in years. In a matter like this, silence is itself a position.

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WE THEREFORE JOIN the PUL in calling on President Joseph Nyuma Boakai to direct the CSA to suspend the agreement and return to the table with the IIC, the Legislature, civil society and the press. If there are records that need protecting, let the government name them, narrowly and in writing, within the exemptions the FOI Act already allows. Let no civil servant be made to sign away the public’s right to know as the price of a paycheck. And let the IIC be funded, housed and respected as the law intends.

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THE PRESIDENT DESERVES credit for proclaiming a Month of Good Governance. But a proclamation is like a fine lappa hanging on the line; it looks good, yet it warms nobody until somebody wears it. Good governance is not a theme printed on a banner at the EJS Ministerial Complex. It is the market woman’s right to ask, “Where did our money go?” and to receive an honest answer. Any policy that makes that question harder to ask, or more dangerous to answer, has no place in a government that wants to be remembered for openness. Rescind it.