RTI Conference – enough platitudes time for action

The President was only too right, when he stated the obvious, that we know as being the TRUTH. Namely, that the Politicians and Public Officials have NOT identified their duties and responsibilities and thus are NOT carrying out what they have been tasked with.

http://www.dailymirror.lk/116552/Many-politicians-officials-haven-t-identified-their-duties-President

Little wonder then that the Govt. is impotent, and with crass passive aggressive approach of the Public Officials nothing gets done in the Public Sector leaving the Private Sector to shoulder the burden of growing and maintaining this economy singlehandedly, and despite all the ODDS stacked against them.

The Passage of the Right to Information Bill, will NOT in itself result in any of these things changing, but the fact that the Public have the right to certain information, which when made public, could result in the public official being taken to task, will go half way in making an improvement to the current status quo.

The public should not rest on this passage, but ensure that the appropriate and competent people are appointed to provide the information, as most people in each govt. department are unaware of even how to extract the information that is requested. There will be a period of years, of learning from their mistakes, to be able to fine tune and streamline the information search, to be more productive and useful to the user.

On the more important aspect of Media Reform however, we have NOT even begun this humungous task, of cleaning up what is the most deeply corrupt, and incompetent profession, which after years of interference of the Govt. have NO truly independent and competent professionals in the Industry. It is simply rotten from the top, owners, and editors must take responsibility for this state of affairs, and I don’t see that they have even begun to take steps to arrest this decline, which one would have thought would have arrested itself upon the establishment of this Good Governance Govt.

Of course the Govt. itself is NOT capable of this task, and it is up to an independent commission, authority, which could combine RTI and Media Ethics, to at a stroke address both these issues simultaneously, educating the public on this change, and why due to it, we can expect to see a decline in corruption, and incompetent mismanagement of the public purse as a result.