FoIA constraints suppress investment inflow – experts

Constraints of the Freedom of Information Act (FoIA), experts say, significantly inhibit the inflow of foreign investment into Africa’s largest economy, despite its almost irresistible sheer market size.

Speaking at the World Press Freedom Day workshop held Wednesday at the United Nations Information Centre, the experts identified that not only was the FoIA central to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), acknowledging the act was also crucial to attracting foreign investors who need statistical information to ascertain business climates.

However, operating in a near statistical void – largely due to non- compliance of some public and private entities to the FoIA and the failure of many to leverage the Act to access information – has been seen stifling investment inflows into the 180 million Nigerian market.

This comes on the heels of a National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) report, which reveals that total foreign investment inflow into Nigeria dipped to its lowest in nine years. Investment inflows slumped by 54.34 percent to $710.97 million in the first quarter of 2016.

“It becomes a guess game for investors who must make strategic decisions on where their investments can generate optimal returns,” Nosa Owens-Ibie, professor of communication, media and development, Caleb University, Lagos, said.

“If you came to me for example, as an investor, and you pitch your population size to me, as against providing empirical evidence on the RoI (return on investment) I stand to derive by investing in your country, I’ll always go with the second,” Owens-Ibie said.

Patrick Izobo, director of the Nigerian Press Council, shared a similar view, saying, “What we are losing as a result of the statistical void is of enormous magnitude and it slows down our development drive.

“If foreign investors had data, their interest in investing in the country will multiply because they can now project and see the kind of gains they will make were they to invest.”

The inclusion of public access to information and fundamental freedoms in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), according to Oluseyi Soremekun, the officer- in- charge of the United Nations Information Centre, was of particular importance in this year’s observance of the World Press Freedom day.

“The government has done its part by enacting the law (FoIA). As we celebrate today, let there be an improved public access to information,” Soremekun said.

“I call on public and private and government owned organisations to adopt proactive disclosure of information as a step to increasing public access to information.”

Reiterating the importance of access to information, Owens-Ibie said the freedom of expression would be flawed without the substance that drives the freedom: the information substance.

“The right to information reveals participatory democracy. Democracy cannot function where there are restrictions to accessing information,” Owens-Ibie noted.

Secrecy of organisations has been observed as a threat to accessing information, despite the provisions of the FOIA that the requesters of information need not tender a reason for their request and that if request is not met in seven (7) days, the organisation could be taken to court.

Bridging the communication gap between requesters of information and providers of information, Abigail Ogwezzy-Ndisika, a professor of mass communication, University of Lagos, says would smother the secrecy challenge.

“There is a need to establish a healthy rapport among government and private officials, journalists, and the populace,” she said.

The FOIA was signed into law under the previous administration in 2011. South Africa was the first African nation to sign the bill, and only 17 countries in Africa have done so till date. It is an Act to make public records and information more freely available, provide for public access to public records and information, protect public records and information to the extent consistent with the public interest and the protection of personal privacy, protect serving public officers from adverse consequences of disclosing certain kinds of official information without authorization and establish procedures for the achievement of those purposes and; for related matters.

After five years of existence, the Act has been leveraged by media organisations and civil societies in obtaining information.

Experts at the workshop unanimously urged President Buhari’s administration to follow through on the Act and review it to suit evolving dynamics.