The Nigerian Investment Promotion Commission, the Revenue Mobilisation, Allocation and Fiscal Commission, and the Development Bank of Nigeria have emerged as the top three agencies on the 2024 Freedom of Information Ranking of 245 Ministries, Departments and Agencies in the country.
This was contained in the 2024 FoI ranking unveiled by the Public and Private Development Centre in collaboration with Accountability Lab Nigeria, Media Right Agenda, International Centre for Investigative Reporting, BudgiT Foundation and Right To Know.
The top five ranked institutions include the Nigerian Investment Promotion Commission, the Revenue Mobilisation, Allocation and Fiscal Commission, the Development Bank of Nigeria, the Nigerian Export Processing Zones Authority, and the Bureau of Public Service Reforms.
Meanwhile, the least-ranked institutions are the Office of the National Security Adviser, the Federal Ministry of Police Affairs, the National Centre for Control of Small Arms and Light Weapons, the Industrial Arbitration Panel, and the Librarians Registration Council of Nigeria.
The rankings were based on public institutions’ proactiveness, level of disclosure and level of responsiveness to FoI requests, seeking to unveil the compliance level of the institutions with the Freedom of Information Act 2011 to promote transparency in Nigeria.
According to the rankings, of the 245 institutions, only 1.22% were fully proactive, 6.94% were partially active, and the other 91.84% of the MDAs were non-proactive. On the level of exposure, only 9.39% of the MDAs fully disclosed the requested information, 5.71% partially disclosed the information requested, and 84.9% failed to disclose the requested information.
The rankings further showed that 20% of MDAs responded within seven days of an FOI request, 7.8% responded within 8-14 days, and 91.84% responded after 14 days or did not respond.
Addressing journalists during the unveiling event, the Programme Officer of Right To Know, Victoria Etim, explained that the security sector and the judiciary, except for the Supreme Court, were among some of the worst-performing agencies in terms of responding to FoI requests.
“A lot of times, it’s the security sector. Unfortunately, sometimes you also have the judiciary. We have a few like the Supreme Court that is always sending its annual reports, but overall, the security sector”, she said.
She added that part of the challenges faced during the assessment was an inactive website of some MDAs.
“Basically, we looked into government websites to see if they have pertinent information on their website, and we found that a number of the institutions did not have it. No data from their website and that has been a huge problem for us in the assessment. We want to encourage the non-performing MDAs to do better next year,” she added.
