Response to Stiglitz

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Abstract It is improbable that any democrat will argue against the Stiglitz thesis that ‘there should be a strong presumption in favour of transparency and openness in government’. As he rightly observes, ‘in today’s world, no one argues against openness, only against excessive openness’. Albeit, most of the arguments which public officials use to justify excessive openness ‘are simply self-serving rationalizations’. In the words of Weber, ‘the pure interest of the bureaucracy in power . . . is efficacious far beyond those areas where purely functional interests make for secrecy.’ Indeed, ‘nothing is so fantastically defended by the bureaucracy’ as the concept of the ‘official secret’. The concept has been ‘enriched’ in the Third World, the subject of my comment, by the colonial experience; the bureaucracy here considers it its right and privilege to deny citizens any information with regard to the workings of the government. Unfortunately, the elected representatives are no less prone to abuse power and to enrich themselves behind the veil of ‘official secrecy’.