BY EMMANUEL AZIKEN

Only few Nigerians would have been spectacularly positioned as Chief Nduka Irabor, the former journalist who served a prison sentence for publishing an exclusive story to champion open access to official documents.

Irabor and Tunde Thompson were punished by the Muhammadu Buhari junta for publishing diplomatic postings about to be made by the junta in 1984. It was as such remarkable that following his election as a member of the House of Representatives representing Ika Federal Constituency of Delta State in 1999 that Irabor became a point man for the Freedom of Information Coalition that first articulated a bill to open government information to the public.

The coalition members were led to Irabor in 1999 by Edetan Ojo, a former journalist who, remarkably, had worked as a journalist in The Guardian under Irabor.

The bill and the enthusiasm of the coalition members were welcomed by Irabor who eventually brought the bill to his fellow members in the G 16. The G 16 was famed in its influence in dictating the legislative course of the House. Among the members were other young men like Nze Chidi Duru (Aguata, Anambra) and the late Tony Anyanwu from Imo State. Also supportive of the bill was Dr. Jerry Ugwoke who had come from the United States of America where the Freedom of Information Act had become operational for some time.

Progression of the bill was immediately stalled by two factors. In the House of Representatives, many of the lawmakers were apprehensive that, given what they regarded as the awesome powers of the press, FOI Act would turn out to giving the press far more too power.

Besides, progress on the bill was stalled by the Obasanjo factor. President Olusegun Obasanjo was reportedly not disposed to any legislative proposal that did not come from him.

So for much of the time of the first House of Representatives of the fourth republic, the bill did not make much progress despite the efforts of Irabor and his G16.

In the Senate, the bill was a no-comer. It simply was not even considered for progress.
“The problem was mutual suspicion, nobody trusted the motive of the bill,” Irabor told Sunday Vanguard in a telephone interview.

“The public then was more interested in salacious stories such as the entitlements of legislators and furniture allowance and all that,” Irabor added.

At the inauguration of the 2003 Senate and with the late Senator Tawar Wada as Chairman of the Senate Committee on Information, efforts were made to dig out the bill, but opposition to the bill was all over in the Senate.
In the House of Representatives, though Irabor and many members of his group had left the House in 2003, the stewardship of the bill fell on Abike Dabiri, the former broadcast journalist turned lawmaker.

Dabiri’s efforts were, unlike Irabor and Ugwoke, stymied mostly by  antagonism within the House. Dabiri was equally scorned by some who would otherwise have supported the bill as they alleged she was making fame with her crusade with the bill.

Her persistence failed until the end of the House in 2007.

Meanwhile, outside the House, Irabor continued to mobilize in his own way support for the bill.
Eventually, he sought to shift attention to the issues being raised by many people against the bill. One was the matter of redress.

“After I left the assembly, we tried to reassure the public that a way would be found for the public to address its concern on a way of seeking recourse,” he said.

Following the inauguration of the new National Assembly in 2007, Dabiri pushed on from where she stopped in 2007 and, this time, the FOI Coalition pushed forward its case for the bill. Text messages were repeatedly sent to the lawmakers by coalition members while the media, through the Newspapers Proprietors Association of Nigeria, NPAN, the Nigerian Guild of Editors, NGE and the Nigerian Union of Journalists (NUJ), stepped up support for the bill.

In their campaigns, they sought to reassure the lawmakers that it was not a media bill but a bill for the general public.

In one of the visits to the National Assembly, the NGE President, Mr. Gbenga Adefaye, was pointedly told by Senator David Mark his main opposition against the bill – that provision should be made to punish journalists who publish libel.

While civil society raised objection to the assertion and what many considered as the watering of the original provisions of the bill as first articulated by Ojo and the FOI Coalition, the final product, as assented to by the president, has largely been welcomed as a first step.