Anybody in the government is there to represent the people, and that's why it is called a mandate. The people give you the mandate to be in charge of their resources and make decisions for them, so everything that goes on, no matter how bad it is, the citizens should know because they have the right to know what's going on in their country.
One of the reasons is that if the citizens know that something is bad, let's say economic meltdown, like all these global recessions, they can actually contribute to mitigating that effect in different ways and different means. They can be of help even in a difficult situation. Secondly, there's no way you will be held accountable if people do not know what is going on. For instance, if you are handling my resources and you don't tell me that there's an issue and something is going bad, obviously I will think that you are stealing the resources. Probably there is something that is happening; maybe you are running a loss on a business and all that. So if there is no clarity or transparency, people cannot trust you, but if they know, they can actually trust you, whether good or bad. If things are good, they should know; if things are bad, they should equally know. To actually build that trust, the people should know.
Even by right, there should be a quarterly audit whereby the government releases all its income and expenditures. Whatever they did with the people's resources was supposed to be accounted for, but they don't do it anyway, but it should happen. There should be audits, even if it's not quarterly, maybe every six months or yearly, whatever way, but that should promote transparency so that in case something is going bad, the people will not blame the government, and when people blame the government, they believe that the government is responsible for the hardship or whatever is going wrong in the country, and that might lead to protests and could also lead to damage to properties and all that.
Then again, if the government hides whatever is going on and keeps it away from the citizens, they live the citizens to assume whatever that comes into their mind. The thing is that there is something the government actually keeps away from the citizens, which is okay, and from my opinion, that should only happen in security. The security architecture is not made public because if you make it public, you are already exposing your strategy to the people you are fighting against. I think this is the only one that shouldn't be made public. Apart from this, I don't think other information should be taken away from the citizens. There's what is called a security vote, where the government map out strategies and also keep funds aside to stop crises from even coming, like proactive measures that happen. If this aspect of information is hidden from the citizens, it's totally fine.
In conclusion, I prefer that the citizens know everything that goes on in their country because it's their right and also because of the reasons I provided above.
This is my response to the #hivelearners community contest on the topic titled, 247 News
All images were taken from canva
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