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The right to know: help fighting impunity and opacity

15 août 2016, 13:12

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The disclosure of a 22-page damming report attributed to the Senior Adviser of the Minister of Finance on the Heritage City resulted in the freezing of the project. Its collateral damage in financial, political and diplomatic terms will become apparent in the days ahead.

Unlike many sycophants spinning around the levers of power, the Senior Adviser faced powerful lobbies and took great risks in going public on a matter of national interest and should be commended for this.

A leakage of no lesser importance, concerning the construction of a gas turbine power plant and three oil storage tanks on the Bain des Dames site by the CEB that would have involved several billions of rupees, has resulted instead in punitive action against three senior officers of the CEB. The General Manager in justifying these measures argued obliquely that the leaked information caused hubris in Parliament. Parliament is indeed the proper forum where public discourses of abuse of authority are denounced and wrong decisions reversed. In a landmark trial in January 1985 at the Old Bailey Court, London, a government official, Clive Pointing, was accused of disclosing official information to an unauthorised person. The documents had been sent to a Member of Parliament who raised the issues at a Select Committee of the House of Commons. It transpired from the trial that nobody had ever been prosecuted before for passing information of national interest to a Member of Parliament.

The public has the right to know whether the letter sent by the General Manager of the CEB on 8th October 2015 to the Senior Chief Executive of the Ministry of Public Utilities asking for exemption of the conditions imposed by the Ramsar Committee is true or not. This is the crux of the matter. The points raised by the Leader of the Opposition proved right and the CEB subsequently changed the site for the construction of the power plant. What would have been the environmental and economic consequences had the letter of the General Manager not been divulged? It could have resulted in a mini Heritage City saga.

Whoever leaked the letter to the Leader of the Opposition and for that matter the Senior Adviser of the Minister of Finance (in the case of the Heritage City) deserves the gratitude of the nation in forestalling projects of doubtful value on sites with dubious geological features. To the authorities, one is a saviour and the other a villain! This is the irony permeating our society.

The leader of the Labour Party justifiably raised the injustice meted out to the three officers of the CEB in his recent public pronouncements. However, he should rather address the cause of the problem and not its symptoms. He should instead take a formal commitment to introduce a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Such an act will help strengthen democracy and allow whistleblowers to denounce abuse of authority of potentates. The present government should without delay implement its own electoral commitment to introduce the FOIA which we understand is in its final stage of preparation at the State Law Office.