A different tune

The cat is out of the bag. After campaigning on the promise that he’d prioritize the passage of a freedom of information bill once he is elected into office, President Aquino has broken the studious silence Malacañang has maintained for over a year on the issue with the clearest indication yet of his government’s sentiments about the proposed bill. In a nutshell, Mr. Aquino thinks giving the public more access to information about how their government works is dangerous.

“You know, having a Freedom of Information Act sounds so good and noble—[but] there’s a tendency of getting information and not really utilizing it for proper purposes,” he said at an open forum before Southeast Asian business leaders.

Something’s off there. When he was in the thick of wooing his countrymen to vote him into the nation’s highest office, Mr. Aquino saw no problem in invoking and embracing the “good and noble” intentions of the Act. Like his mother before him, he forged his candidacy on a ringing oath that he would be the opposite of his predecessor in Malacañang in terms of transparency, openness and accessibility in governing the country and managing the public till. The experience of the past 10 years, with its outrageous and never-ending cavalcade of corruption scandals, pointed to the need for a government run with fairness and probity, and animated by the spirit of accountability to the people it purports to serve. Opening public records and empowering ordinary citizens to look at official transactions—the most basic rights to be laid down in the proposed law—would be the first step in making the government more honest, and less corrupt.

Or so Mr. Aquino said in so many words. Now, however, he is singing a different tune. What happened in the last year or so that made him change his mind, enough for him to publicly disclaim his own promise? The public has a right to know, and he needs to speak more clearly on this. It expects to hear a rational, substantial, well-thought-out justification from Mr. Aquino and his team for this not-inconsequential flip-flop on a major plank of his promised brand of governance. Otherwise, people can be forgiven if they begin to think Mr. Aquino has taken the country for a ride—was merely sweet-talking his way to Malacañang, in effect, but thereafter had no reason to fulfill what he said he would.

Mr. Aquino advanced another reason—inarticulate-sounding, but there it was—for his reluctance to support the bill. “If I may just add, all you have to do is read our newspapers everyday,” he said. “And I think you will agree that there is… nobody can state a fact exactly the same in all of these newspapers. An opinion commenting on the fact is OK, but an opinion masquerading as a fact does not do anyone any good.”

Take away the convoluted syntax, and what Mr. Aquino is saying is that the local media can be an irresponsible lot, and by implication cannot be trusted to use wisely and judiciously a law that would give them a well-defined, legally irreproachable right to poke their noses at the files, receipts, records and everyday minutiae of the government bureaucracy. For someone, however, concerned about how fact allegedly often gets mixed up with and passed off as opinion in the country’s papers, Mr. Aquino has a strange solution to offer. Rather than letting more light in and thereby getting the truth out, whatever it is, he prefers that it remains in the shadows, unexamined, unverified and subject to the very public speculation he now inveighs against.

The solution to misimpression and fallacy, it should be obvious to all, is greater fidelity to truth and transparency. If Mr. Aquino’s government believes it has the facts and wants nothing more than to let the people know about them, then it should find nothing objectionable with concerned citizens, journalists and opinion-makers included, taking the time to hold such so-called facts to the light of public scrutiny. There are enough legal safeguards against the misuse of information against any entity or person; there is, by contrast, hardly anything at present to buttress the public’s right, enshrined in the Constitution but needing crucial fleshing out by the freedom of information bill, to look into the affairs of the government its taxes pay for, at great and burdensome cost.

Mr. Aquino’s sincerity about reforming the country’s politics, eliminating corruption and hewing to transparent, ethical standards in his administration is on the line here. Didn’t he say we’re his boss? Then he should let us in.