News:
October 17, 2011
Mr Dan Kwaku Botwe, Member of Parliament (MP) for Okere constituency has urged civil society groups campaigning for the passage of the Right to Information Law (RTI) to allay the fears of the public that the media would use it to harass politicians and public office holders.
He said the coalition on the RTI should therefore intensify its public education by explaining the importance of the law and its effectiveness in participatory democracy.
Mr Botwe said this in Koforidua when he met a team from the Eastern Regional Coalition on the RTI as part of a programme to lobby MP’s in the Region. He indicated that there was public perception that the law would only benefit journalists and called for more education to erase that perception.
Mr Botwe who is a member of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Information and a former Minister of Information, indicated that withholding of information in any given society did not help progress and so the decision to sensitize the public to get involved was very important.
Mr Botwe emphasized the need for the coalition made up of civil society groups, to explain that journalists already had sources of information and that the law would rather benefit the citizenry.
In his view, technology had made it easier to retrieve information from anywhere; therefore the right to information law was necessary to remove all barricades from accessing information that would help in the political discourse.
He gave the assurance that parliament had been involved through the regional consultative meetings and therefore had ample information to deal with the bill when it came to the floor of parliament for discussion and debate.
Mr Edmund Quaynor, Regional Coordinator of the coalition, said reports from countries such as Ireland showed that the law would be more beneficial to the people than to the media and called on the public to support the coalition.
He added that as part of the public education campaign, the coalition was using radio talk shows and other gatherings to educate and disseminate information about the RTI to arouse the people’s interest in the passage of the bill.
GNA