Access To Information Law A Boost To Democracy and Investigative Journalism

In the past five years, Kenya’s democratic space has had significant positive and negative developments whose impacts bear a resemblance to either the Kenya we are coming from or the Kenya we aspire to be.

The enactment of the Access to Information Act 2016 in August last year was fundamentally prescient of the incorporation of government transparency into our national consciousness going forward. By setting out the specific content of the right to information as per Article 35 of the constitution, the new law is a boost to our democracy in particular ways.

First, being that the law obligates public bodies to disclose details of their functions and structure, it portends a country where the citizens have sufficient understanding of how government works. The constitution espouses public participation in legislation as a fundamental avenue for use by citizens in determining the laws that govern them.

Practically, thoughtful participation in a democratic society can only be achieved through sufficient understanding of how the bureaucratic processes in government unfold.

Secondly the law boosts representative democracy by ensuring the citizen has sufficient information on which to anchor the application of his vote.  Disillusioned voters fall back on ethnic affiliations instead of electing representatives based on policy proposals and a proven capacity to deliver. 

An electorate that is properly informed of its leaders’ development record is better placed to sieve out lackluster leadership and install a more promising regime.  

Thirdly the thoroughgoing spirit of the access to information law can be applied in challenging the systemic corruption that severely ails our democratic discourse.

Corruption upsets the rule of law and derails the actualization of free and fair elections. The entrenchment of these two disruptions is inimical to the perpetuation of a government of the people, by the people and for the people. 

The access to information law is a tool that can be used by the public to break down the walls of secrecy where corrupt officials thrive in.

In Kenya, procurement corruption particularly thrives where only economically privileged groups of people have access to information about available tenders.

Through effective implementation of the law, it will be possible to mitigate procurement corruption since all information about the tendering process will be proactively disclosed leaving little space for clandestine contracting processes.

Encouragingly, the law also acts as a deterrent against corruption. The realization that a decision will be open to scrutiny by the public in future deters decision makers from dishonest conduct.

It is high time we include processes that facilitate anticorruption as priority elements of democracy just as a free media and the rule of law are.

The World Bank’s estimation is that corruption is capable of reducing a country’s growth rate between 0.5 to 1.0 % annually.

Economic decline is contemporaneous with democratic decline. During hard economic times moreso the electioneering period, people’s immediate concern is putting food on the table and not exercising their democratic rights.

At the same time, investigative journalism has taken an upward trajectory in the Kenyan media landscape.

It is commendable that investigative journalists have been able to execute their mandate in a legal regime that has been very prohibitive of their practice.

The enactment of the information law nullifies a major stumbling block in investigative journalism – getting a reliable source.

Journalists have perennially been accused of factless sensational reportage by both the government and members of the public.

In cases where they have revealed their sources, they have been accused of getting the information through backdoor channels since the culture of secrecy still overshadows the principle of maximum disclosure. 

What this law does for investigative journalists is that it completely changes the relationship between the journalists and their sources.  It changes the way the journalist tells the story. Now, the information officer at the public body under investigation is obligated by law to be the source of the information that will be outed about its misconduct.

Initially, information about public officers’ wrongdoing could only be acquired from whistleblowers – a very scarce and threatened demographic within public service.

Hence stories based on the documents submitted by the information officers will not be discounted on the basis of them being from a questionable source. Going forward media houses ought to train their journalists on how to effectively employ the access to information law in denouncing corruption and infringement of human rights.

Even as this law will boost democracy and investigative journalism, there is need for concerted engagement by the civil society and the media in making this right more realizable for the ordinary citizen. Without this, the new law will be like many others, a right that is very distant to the poor.