The right information

By Renato Tibon

“The basic purpose of FOIA is to ensure an informed citizenry, vital to the functioning of a democratic society, need to check against corruption and to hold the governors accountable to the governed.” – US Supreme Court.

FOR most highbrowed people bombarded daily with every kind of information through the oral or print medium or internet technology, including the modern phenomena of social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, sifting out which materials are factual from fake could be like wading through a mountain of debris in the middle of the ocean.

There are plenty of useful things to keep, albeit most are plain wastes. Not that they are cowed by the enormity of the challenge as they are delighted by the sheer amount of knowledge they stand to gain. These are the ones who can distinguish which information are reliable whether they are from government sources or paid media and are vocal for or against it.

It can’t be said however of the greater majority of the ordinary and mediocre folks who would rely on every word mouthed by popular officials even the dubious and vulgar kinds which the former tend to take hook, line, and sinker based on what they superficially see and hear. They couldn’t care less if these officials illegally earned in government transactions such as those from mega infrastructure projects. The truth can be hidden from the fact that there are no effective laws that require transparency and accountability. Despite charges which in any case can’t be readily substantiated given the legal loopholes in the judicial system, people still look up to them being beneficiaries of the age-old patronage system.

Without real information made available to the public, the ability to rightly choose officials to serve in government is greatly compromised perpetuating corruption. And those in service highly relish the system that encouraged the secrecy. Anthony Hincks put it: “When they have something to hide, they put it in the FOI cabinet.” Even today, despite the initial public interest it generated in the previous administrations, the Freedom of Information bill is languishing in someone’s archives. Although it received quite a massive attention among lawmakers as it reached plenary, the subsequent congresses dropped it like a hot potato and nobody would dare touch it. Despite the initiative by President Duterte who signed Executive Order No. 2, also known as the Freedom of Information program, the first such in the country covering all government offices under the Executive Branch for Congress to emulate, a meaningful FOI law enacted in Congress is still dead in the water. The President’s order as far as the Local Government Units (LGUs) are concerned is discretionary as it merely “encourages all LGUs to observe and be guided by this Order.”

For our sake, there’s a real need for the local government units to institutionalize the Freedom of Information through an ordinance and as instructed by PRRD in a joint memorandum circular sent by DILG and the PCOO, they are now required to pass it. In the recent session of the Cagayan de Oro City Council, Councilor Jocelyn “Bebot” Rodriguez took to the floor enjoining her colleagues in the Council to enact an ordinance “institutionalizing the Freedom of Information in the City be it in the Executive or Legislative Department.” She noted that the City of Pasig recently passed their own FOI ordinance “so that the city’s official records, documents, data, and papers can now be requested and accessed through the eFOI portal for the benefit of students, researchers and the public.”  

For the Centrist Democratic Party of the Philippines (CDP), a staunch advocate of autonomy and federalism in the country, four vital pre-conditions must be institutionalized under our laws. Among them are political reforms such as prohibiting turncoats and regulating campaign expenditures, banning political dynasties, electoral reforms in the Comelec and the passage of the Freedom of Information Act which aims to mandate the disclosure of public documents and transactions. The latter would likewise enhance greater fiscal transparency and citizen participation in governance. Without these reforms, the path towards genuine people empowerment under a federal government would be thorny and fraught with risks.  

It is quite ironic that in this day and age when there’s a surfeit of information from all over the globe, ignorance and the penchant for the superficial and mundane are still the order and preference by most even among the young once. Many in my age bracket can’t go beyond learning text and call on their android gadgets even if their lives depended on it. Refusing to teach themselves to use WiFi or data application with their device to access important articles, books, and knowledge which in our time, can only be freely accessed in the library or Encyclopedia books, they fancy and content themselves with the bits and pieces of information they got from print, TV or radio news feeds to form their opinions on issues of import. If they join Facebook at all, and only lately I found out, they hide their faces and volunteer scant information which they thought compromised their privacy.

The young, generally lackadaisical about reading serious content and substance unless they’re on research, opt instead for sharing photos or images that speak of themselves and short videos about their lives through Instagram. They won’t need potentially worthless information like a hole in their heads as much as the need to know about current situations; the less for them, the better shunting themselves out of responsibility about the order of things. I don’t want to hazard a guess where we are truly headed but in the absence of the right and truthful information which public or private media deprive us of and the general apathy towards learning, it could only be tragic for the country.

(Renato Gica Tibon is a fellow of the Fellowship of the 300, an elite organization under Centrist Democracy Political Institute with focus on political technocracy. He  holds both position as political action officer and program manager of the Institute. He is the former regional chairman for Region 10 and vice president for Mindanao of the Centrist Democratic Party of the Philippines.)