Comment given to The Mercury regarding a circular distributed to eThewini Metro staff by City Manager Mike Sutcliffe, asking staff not to release any documents to anyone except with permission from the City Manager or Deputy City Manager.

It is legitimate for city managers to develop procedures for information flow. But the way in which the eThekwini municipality is going about this may create more problems around information flow than it solves. It may well lead to constipated information flows, which in turn will reduce the transparency of the municipality's operations. In fact, the attempt to stop documents from being distributed without the permission of the city manager is unworkable.

The municipality is a large organisation with a large number of staff. There are many documents that staff will have to hand over to people, as part of their daily work, for instance city plans required by architects. The instruction will make this impossible. It is also impractical for all information requests to be referred to two people only, as they will have to be constantly available to decide on which documents can be released, and which can't.

It is also unclear what will become of records that should be considered automatically available information, in terms of the Promotion of Access to Information Act (PAIA). The FXI would like to see as much information as possible defined as automatically available information, as this prevents people from having to use PAIA to access records, which should be
used as a last resort if documents cannot be accessed in the normal course of events. It was never the intention of the drafters of PAIA that it be used for each and every information request, anyway. By forcing people to use PAIA, the city risks creating bottlenecks that may take weeks to clear. Also, it will make it impossible for people to access documents urgently, as they will probably have to wait the full 30 days before getting a response.

Also, there are clear implementation problems with PAIA, with approximately 64% of requests in 2004 being met with mute refusals. If the city is going to channel more people into using PAIA, then it needs to show that it has the capacity to process these requests, and will not simply let them go to die on some beurocrat's desk, as seems to be the national trend.

But what is most disturbing is that this circular seems to be an attempt to plug document leaks to the media. The municipality knows well that there is no provision for expidited requests for the media, which means that they will have to wait out the 30 day period before getting a response to their request. By then, a story may well be dead.

The way to deal with concerns about leaks is to enhance the transparency of the municipality, and to facilitate the work of journalists, rather than reducing transparency and frustrating journalists on deadline, as the latter approach will probably lead to more leaks being sprung.