Members of the the Media Coalition on the Right to Information Bill, a group championing the passage of the RTI bill were today, blocked from entering the legislature in an attempt to storm the House over failure to pass the bill into law.
The disappointed Journalists lament they’d earlier planned to walk into the lawmaking Chamber to impress upon the legislators on the need for the bill to be passed soon.
A member of the group Umaru Adams told the media its quiet frustrating for them to be subjected to such embarrassment although they had a justifiable course of visiting the House on Tuesday.
“We are here to express our grievances concerning the bill; we don’t know where the bill is right now. We were told the bill is at Cabinet, we were told the bill is at the AG, we were told the bill is in parliament. So we’re in parliament to find out whether the bill is there. And when we came this morning the Police were just asking us to move. We don’t know, according to one of them, he said we have to write to them before we’ll go the Public gallery. The reason is we wear T-shirt of RTI that is the reason that they gave us. I don’t understand why a citizen of the state going to the gallery too you have to write to the Police… that is our concern now. The reason is we were given instruction by the top that they should not allow anybody from RTI.”
The RTI bill was laid before Parliament by the Deputy Attorney General Joseph Kpemka Dindiok in March this year.
It has been 22 years since the first RTI bill was drafted under the auspices of the Institute of Economic Affairs, IEA and 16 years since the Executive arm of government in 2002 drafted the first RTI bill.
The draft Executive Bill was subsequently reviewed in 2003, 2005 and 2007 but was never laid in Parliament until February 5, 2010.
The Centre for Democratic Development (CDD) earlier this month accused the governing New Patriotic Party and the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) of colluding against the Right to Information (RTI) bill.
“…If there’s one, or two or three things that the two main political parties [NPP and NDC] align, agree to, then, it is this RTI that they don’t want. I think that’s what it is,” the Deputy Director of the CDD Dr Franklin Oduro who is also the CDD’s Head of Research and Program said at a roundtable discussion on METOGU anti-corruption report in Accra.
“My own view is that these two parties have demonstrated that they don’t want the RTI. So there’s no blame game between them, the NDC and the NPP,” he added.
