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South Africa

OGP: Progress in South Africa

Gabriella Razzano|

In South Africa spring is newly sprung, and that energy has been channeled into a comprehensive civil society monitoring plan for the South African Open Government Partnership Commitments. South Africa, as a founding partner, lodged its Action Plan of eight core commitments on 20 September 2012. It is almost a year since they were official presented to the world, thus presenting a perfect opportunity to reflect on any progress. As part of our ongoing work in furthering access to information and open data in South Africa, the Open Democracy Advice Centre has a launched a comprehensive blog for monitoring the commitments on multiple levels. After considering the Draft IRM process, as well as the peculiarities of the South African environment, we have decided on a model which will be tracking the commitments along two main paths:

  1. Tracking the progress of Commitments made;
  2. Establishing, through public participation and research methods, a better idea of what the commitments should have been; and tracking progress on those as a broader reflection of the state of transparency in South Africa.

The aim of the second path is not to create yet another transparency index, but rather to build on already existing indexes to feed directly into the OGP process and gain a broader picture of South Africa’s overall efforts in open government.  This will be underpinned by a detailed investigation into the information needs of South Africans that will occur through our “Information Needs Project”; the general public will be able to engage with the OGP process by adding their contributions directly through our website or through the outreach initiatives we will be pursuing. The first path has been initiated with a review of the source and originality of the commitments that were undertaken. The results were not encouraging: the vast majority of the commitments can essentially be viewed as a continuation of the general duties and projects of the Department of Public Services and Administration (the oversight department). While the Plans may build on work already being done, it is sad to see such a cursory adoption of ideas having been undertaken – especially given that the OGP calls to “stretch government practice beyond its current baseline”. Perhaps one of the more exciting and original ideas – the Environmental Portal – was as a direct result of civil society engagement that had to be pursued outside of governments planned public participation mechanisms. The most noteworthy aspect of the South African process, however, is the fact that Cabinet has still not allegedly approved the OGP Commitments – in spite of the fact that they were tabled 349 days ago. How they could in fact be tabled without proper executive authorisation is a concern which may need to be explored, but more immediately this failure means that the delay on forwarding the main activities has been significant. It is believed that regular, engaged and facilitative monitoring – as we have proposed – will help overcome this impasse.

Filed Under: Africa and the Middle East Champions National Open Data Public Participation Right to Information
Open Government Partnership