Power vs freedom
FREEDOM OF information, an issue that constitutes a critical test for any nation with any pretension to democracy, has hung unresolved hereabouts all these years. I’m not surprised really, although I must confess being myself persuaded, once Noynoy Aquino became president, to suspend disbelief about a law guaranteeing that freedom passing—ever. After all, he promised it, and he seems a man of his word—indeed, he tends to take his own word beyond its intrinsic, reasonable worth, not unlike Charlie Brown, who believes sincerity alone will carry him to every victory: “How could we lose when we were so sincere.”
Well, I got him wrong—wrong on the precise intervention that could reinforce his principal avowal. Imagine how far his war on corruption can carry with a law punishing the withholding of information in government files. At any rate, he has said nothing reassuring about the law, and he has no excuse.
It’s a law that stands on its simple, solid logic, dealing as it does with information that by its very classification (public) is in the public interest and, therefore, the people ought to know. Of course, one only has to insist on it to find some argument for softening or otherwise limiting the law. The case for national security may be reasonably conceded. In fact, a Freedom of Information Law is concession enough in itself; by specifying the information covered by it, it necessarily narrows the freedom granted by the Constitution in much wider, if general, terms. I’d have lived with the law myself in exchange alone for its penal provisions for concealing public information.
As it happens, it’s on the case for freedom that no concession is given at all. The Freedom of Information Bill has languished in Congress for so long–years, indeed!—that its coming to pass into some decent law has become a reason-defying prospect.
Anyway, the patronizing and the posturing go on. Members of Congress continue to mount forums on the issue, giving the impression that not only is it alive, it’s pulsating with the energy of democracy.
A patsy long enough, I’ve stopped obliging them myself. The whole farce has re-convinced me that the issue is a natural battleground between power and freedom; between those who, for their wealth, influence,and stature, deserve only to be watched, the likes of whom Congress precisely crawls with, and, opposite them, the press, the constitutionally assigned watchdog on them.
I’m done playing. Congress can sit on the Freedom of Information Bill till kingdom-come, and I’ll just continue enlisting whistleblowers and exploding my old trusty stink bomb to ferret my targets out.
That way, I think, the public will be better served.
Reproduced from BusinessWorld (published October 25, 2012), of which the writer is the publisher.
[…] I’ve said here last week, it’s all a game of power vs freedom, a game I have myself decided to stop playing by declining invitations to the hearings. At any […]