Open government: How Swedish citizens help run their country

Can you visualise yourself walking to President Museveni or Prime Minister Amama Mbabazi’s office, and asking to peruse any official correspondences between or to any of them?
Chances are fear could seize and encumber you or their security detail could intercept, and or, turn you away as an intruder.

There is this sharp contrast, though. In Sweden, a 10-hour flight away from Entebbe airport, a 1776 legislation mandatorily requires public servants to document and archive records of their formal meetings and correspondences, and empowers citizens to access them, including incoming or outgoing official letters.

A country with many freedoms
Sweden has the oldest Freedom of the Press Act, enacted 237 years ago. The only information a public official may not disclose to any member of the public is that expressly barred by a specific law, according to Claes Jernaeus, a senior advisor at the country’s Foreign Press Centre in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Thus, citizens have been empowered to scrutinise the government on all fronts, helping to build a bridge of trust with their leaders that in turn has eased governance of the Nordic country.

The Swedes are imbued with pride that their country is one of the most open and equal societies in the world, making it a glass house of sorts.
“If people know that they are being watched, they behave better than they otherwise would,” said Anette Novak, the chief executive of Interactive Institute, an experimental IT and design research institution.
A former editor and media consultant, Novak argued that “transparency” renders government officials compliant to law and inspires citizens to work together for the society’s common good instead of having the “we against them” ideology.

Various global surveys rank Sweden, and its Nordic neighbours – Iceland, Denmark, Finland and Norway – highest on development indices, with least corruption and enviable per capita incomes as well as livable cities. Every person in Sweden has equal access to tax payer-funded and largely decentralsied healthcare services. The country is a leader on gender equality, a master in research and innovativeness, and, an oasis of peace.

Stockholm, with a population of 881,000 by end of 2012 and spread over 12 municipalities, looks elaborately planned with an amazing maze of modern transportation infrastructure. But deputy city planning director, Niklas Svensson, says they are re-engaging with communities to enforce high-end environmental solutions and expand housing – an inner-city renewal engineered through addition of floors on existing storey structures – in a capital requiring 100,000 extra apartments by 2030.

That strict ecological compliance, for instance, is manifest in and has helped transform Hammarby Sjöstad, a former derelict industrial zone and Lake Hammarby Sjö harbour, into a showpiece self-sustaining satellite Stockholm municipality.

Some 900 new apartments use biogas derived from treated sludge, project information officer Malena Karlson said, explaining the benefits of recycling waste for re-use, touted here as the “from toilet to omelette” principle.

Managing waste
Solid waste management in this rebuilt part of Stockholm is complex and entirely out-of-sight, making it an attraction for city planners, related professionals and policy makers to visit and learn from.

It is the energy-efficient stationary – some call it automated – vacuum system for solid waste in use, which Kampala Capital City Authority could explore with a locally-tailored touch to manage growing solid waste volumes.

With this technology, households sort and drop off wastes – organic, degradable and combustible – through in-house inlets that cart them into ducts fitted with a computerised detector to tell which type of waste is which, and the waste is then sucked away through a network of under-ground pipes for further management offsite.
“By learning from each other, the steering group chairman Lars Fränne GlashusEtt wrote in the project brief, “we can all make real progress towards a sustainable society in the years ahead.”

This model of sustainable city development concept has worked out well so far, as in other developed parts of the world, because of consultation with and cooperation of the public and ingenuity of motley professionals, according to Karlson. Information sharing is the lubricant.

Swedish bureaucrats and academics argue that a government, and by extension a country, is unlikely to develop if its leaders operate in the dark and hide from or deprive citizens of information required to make knowledgeable choices.

They call their type of governance, “the government as an open book”. This is the reason, Pereric Högberg, the head of Africa Department in the ministry of Foreign Affairs, says they are pushing for Internet freedom across the world so that individuals’ right to express themselves is observed “online as is offline”.

Last year, Sweden sponsored and rallied dozens of countries, including the United States, to support a UN Human Rights resolution on Internet freedom that passed in Geneva, Switzerland, on July 5.

Russia, India, Chile and China had opposed the resolution, citing rising cybercrime and unauthorised publication online of classified security information, and argued instead that domestic cyberspace laws should take precedent over international rules.

Since the resolution passed, the Swedish government has airlifted journalists, civil society actors and academics from developing countries to Stockholm to expose them firsthand to their practice at home on running a transparent government that espouses free media while protecting the rights of bloggers, netizens and other Internet users. Such an approach levels the “playing field between regions and continents, changing people’s lives – making them less vulnerable, and reducing poverty.”

Freedom contrasts
That envisaged level of online freedom sharply contrasts with sporadic government inhibitions in Uganda, and constraints imposed by physical infrastructure incapacity.
For instance, Internet penetration in Uganda averages 15 per cent up from 4 per cent in 2007, according to results of the latest surveys by Freedom House, a US watchdog organisation. It shows a growth, but one not fast enough to increase availability of high speed Internet to majority of citizens as envisaged under the troubled Chinese-funded and executed national optic-fibre backbone infrastructure.

The government has set up a social media monitoring unit for online surveillance, and Uganda was one of three African countries that in the first six months of this year, asked administrators of social networking site, Facebook, for details of one of its users.
The request was made for information to strengthen a case against a person the government suspects is involved in cybercrime, Spokesman Ofwono Opondo said. Many Internet users balked at the news as unwarranted state intrusion and threat on citizens online.

Their fears had a history. In 2009, state actors ordered telecommunication companies in the country to block social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter and filter out specific words. The same happened in 2011 at the height of street protests, which the opposition called walk-to-work. Freedom House says the media in Uganda, where Daily Monitor and Red Pepper as well as KFM and Dembe FM radios were closed for 11 days in May, is “partly free”.
There is no documented evidence directly linking the worsening corruption and public mistrust in the Ugandan government, as recent surveys showed, to government withholding information from citizens.

However, working in the dark enables bureaucrats to cut dirty deals or simply pilfer public resources at will as it happened in the Office of the Prime Minister, a $13m scandal that prompted Sweden and other donors to cut aid to Uganda and ask for a refund of their stolen monies.

Downsides
Information freeze is not only a Ugandan disease, and in Sweden, private businesses or public-private entities are legally off scrutiny.

Business writer Amanda Billner, her colleague Maria Davidson and their managing editor Mats Johansson - all employees of Tidningarnas Telegrambyrå, a subscriber-based multi-media news agency - expressed frustration over the legal provision that sets businesses off-limit.
According to Billner, often, government officials delay to give requested information until after the news deadline. Others offer partial information and many documents received are scrambled.

In instances where a bureaucrat opts to read contents rather than share copies of official correspondences, it becomes difficult for a journalist in Sweden to ascertain its veracity. “Overall, the media (in Sweden) still find it easier operate and get information, particularly from public officials,” she said.

Officials say whereas one in every five Swedes was born out of the country, it still grapples with integration challenges, with most immigrants settled in the more rural northwestern part.

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