Media Rights Indict CLTC As ‘FOI Hall of Shame’ Inductee

BY COBHAM NSA, ABUJA – For flagrantly treating the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act with contempt, the Media Rights Agenda (MRA) has named the Citizenship and Leadership Training Centre (CLTC) as the latest inductee into the FOI Hall of Shame.

The indictment, contained in a statement by the MRA’s Programme Manager for FOI, Mr Ridwan Sulaimon, said CLTC earned the inglorious award following its poor rating on all of its duties and responsibilities under the FOI Act.

Launched in July 2017, the FOI Hall of Shame aims at exposing and drawing attention to public officials and institutions that undermine the effectiveness of the FOI Act

The statement accused the Centre of exhibiting a total disregard for the FOI Act and grossly demonstrating lack of willingness to comply with any provision of the Law.

According to the statement, “it is ironic that a Centre established to address the leadership challenges confronting the country and on which the Federal Government has put its hope of moulding responsible citizens is wilfully breaking the Law, particularly a law aimed at ensuring transparent and accountable governance.” 

Insisting that the ‘Centre obviously does not deserve to exist as it either does not know or is unable to meet even the most basic requirement of civic duties’ the MRA stated that the Centre was assessed based on the duties and obligations of public institutions contained in the FOI Act and the Implementation Guidelines for the FOI Act issued by the Attorney-General of the Federation.

These include the “obligation to issue and submit annual reports on the implementation of the Act by the institution; to response to FOI requests from members of the public; to designate FOI desk officers and publicise their contacts; to train their officials on the public’s rights of access to information and to proactively publish certain categories of information even without anyone asking for them.”

“Sadly, the Centre performed extremely poorly in virtually all of these indices”, the MRA said, adding that, “Since the enactment of the FOI Act in 2011, the Centre has not submitted any annual implementation report to the Attorney General of the Federation, as required by Section 29 of the Act; it has not proactively published the 16 categories of information that it is required to publish in accordance with Section 2(3) and (4) of the Act; and there is no indication whatsoever that the Centre has designated any officer to whom requests for information may be sent.  It has certainly not proactively published the title and address of such officer, putting it in breach of Section 2(3)(f) of the Act”, the MRA said.

The statement, which expressed regrets that there is nothing to suggest the Centre has trained its personnel on the public’s right of access to information, as required by the Act, added that CLTC is also known to have repeatedly ignored and treated with disdain requests made to it for information.

It stated that in January 2017, the Public and Private Development Centre (PPDC) submitted an FOI request to the Centre asking for records of payments for capital projects in 2016; list of contracts awarded by Centre in 2016; and the procurement plan within its approval threshold for the year 2017, but the request was ignored by the Centre.

“It is not surprising that the findings of the PPDC in its 2017 FOI ranking of 166 public institutions based on an assessment of the levels of public access to procurement related records and information, such as information on procurement plans, procurement processes and capital expenditure, which was released on September 28, 2017, also put the Citizenship and Leadership Training Centre amongst the worst performing set of institutions”, the statement maintained.

MRA therefore challenged the Director-General, Mr Jonah Bawa, to redeem the CLTC’s image by ensuring that necessary measures are in place to facilitate compliance with the relevant provisions of the FOI Act.

Established by an Act of the National Assembly, the CLTC is a Federal human development institution “for the training and moulding of Nigeria citizenry to become responsible and respectable citizens and leaders.”