IPPR rebuts Tweya

…Stands firm by its access denied report
By Hilary Mare
THE Institute for Public Policy Re­search (IPPR) has rubbished claims by former Minister of Information and Communication Technology, Tjekero Tweya, that its recently published Access Denied report was “devoid of any truth” cou­pled with claims the IPPR has a “malicious agenda”.
Graham Hopwood, IPPR Executive Direc­tor last week bemoaned Tweya’s comments as disappointing as he chose to issue a blanket condemnation of the Access Denied report.
Tweya was last Thursday moved to the Ministry of Industrialization, Trade and SME Development in President Hage Gein­gob’s first cabinet reshuffle.
“The IPPR’s researchers hand delivered in­formation requests to 20 ministries. All the requests were addressed to the relevant per­manent secretaries. It is difficult to accept the Minister’s argument that the information re­quests should not have been sent to the Per­manent Secretaries but rather to the Public Relations Officers in each Ministry and that this somehow resulted in the high number of non-responses.
“It is concerning if the offices of Perma­nent Secretaries are not capable of passing on information requests to the ministry PROs or other relevant officials. Follow-up phone calls and emails were also made to the Permanent Secretaries’ offices. In addition, the IPPR chose to address the information requests to Permanent Secretaries because in the past we have been told by Ministry PROs and other officials that requests for informa­tion should be sent first to the Permanent Secretaries’ offices. Our colleagues in the media have also confirmed that this is often the response from PROs and other govern­ment officials,” said Hopwood.
The report titled Access Denied was aimed at determining to what extent various min­istries, SOEs and regions would respond with specific information requested by the researchers.
The report findings are that 80 percent of all organisations could not provide the pub­lic information requested.
It further reveals that 85 percent of the public enterprises were unresponsive while only one region, Erongo managed to provide the requested information.
Following its release, Tweya called for a press conference to express his dismay and went an extra mile in a bid to prove IPPR wrong.
“As a minister mandated to ensure that the citizens have unfettered access to gov­ernment information, I was shocked by the findings of the report, as I was at the fore­front of introducing mechanisms in place that will make information easily accessible to the public,” said Tweya.
The minister said, in a bid to test the credibility of the Access Denied Report, he knocked at the door of each ministry to find out whether they had been approached at all by the IPPR or not and why they had with-held public information.
The findings show that 80 percent of the information requested was in the public do­main and easily accessible while most was available on websites of government offices, ministries and agencies, he said.
“Therefore, it is disheartening for a rep­utable research institution such as IPPR to misinform the public in such a manner,” ex­tended Tweya.
In response to this Hopwood said: “The IPPR’s researchers had checked official web­sites to see if the requested information was already available on line. It would be helpful if the MICT could list the URLs where all this information is available. It should also be pointed out that the requests made by the IPPR were carefully chosen to be non-con­troversial so that there was no question of responses being denied on grounds of ‘secu­rity’”.
.Hopwood highlighted that the Minister also claimed that IPPR “came short of pro­viding a list of names of those officials they have contacted” to the Ministry after the launch of the report on December 5 last year. Again the Minister claimed “the IPPR re­search team promised to provide MICT with the names of the so-called public servants whom they contacted, but could not submit such list.”
“It has to be pointed out that after the re­port was launched, the MICT contacted the IPPR for further information on the officials who had been approached for information on December. It was made clear at the launch and then to the MICT that the approaches had been made to Permanent Secretaries. The IPPR sent a table listing officials who had been contacted during follow-up calls and emails to MICT on Wednesday Decem­ber 13.
The MICT official who had been request­ing the information responded via email lat­er on December 13 by saying ‘Thanks a mil­lion’. There was no further response from the Ministry saying that the information provid­ed was inadequate in any way,” he said.