Residents of the Bongo District may likely pay the price for the failures of the area’s local government officials if the Right to Information (RTI) Commission determines that the District Assembly failed to adhere to its directives to release information on learning desks expenditure from 2020 to 2024.
The RTI Commission gave the directive in a letter dated January 19, 2026, and addressed to the District Chief Executive after it concluded that the assembly did not provide “a complete, accurate, and consistent” response to a request for information Dreamz FM’s journalist made under the RTI law.
The journalist, Abdul-Gafaru Salifu, had petitioned the Commission, raising concerns about non-disclosure and discrepancies with information the assembly had provided him following an earlier directive by the Commission.
He had said, in his petition, that the assembly failed to disclose its expenditure on learning desks from 2020 to 2024—a key component of his request—and that he had observed inconsistencies with data the assembly released on the furniture procured for the period and the distribution of the same.
He further expressed dissatisfaction with some of the documents provided to support the data, stating that they were not fully captured and thus, concealing critical information.
The Commission upheld his claims and wrote to the assembly, ordering it to make a full and accurate disclosure within 7 days.
The Bongo District Assembly has since written back to the Commission but without granting full access to the information requested.
In a letter dated January 22, 2026, and signed on behalf of the DCE by the District Coordinating Director, the assembly made reference to a figure it provided in the earlier release, saying it is the expenditure for 2024, but failed to disclose its spending on learning desks for 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023.
It also failed to reconcile the inconsistencies and properly capture some of the documents.
The Commission has yet to make a decision, but if it determines that the assembly, through its officials, failed to adhere to its directive without justifiable reason, the law empowers it to penalize the agency.
Many state institutions have contravened the law and been fined by the Commission. They include the Ghana Cocoa Board, which has been fined to the tune of GH¢300,000; the Keta Municipal Assembly, which was fined GH¢60,000; and the Ghana Airport Company Limited (GACL), which incurred a fine to the tune of GH¢200,000.
The Commission often slaps these fines on the institutions, basically absolving the offending officers from personally suffering the penalty.
But the Auditor-General, in its 2024 report, ordered that the amount of GH¢200,000 the GACL lost due to the fine the Commission had imposed should be recovered directly from the Managing Director and Management team of the company.
