Nigeria has dropped in the 2020 corruption ranking released by Transparency International (TI) on Thursday.
The country dropped three places and scored lower in number of points than in its previous year’s record.
This is an indicator that corruption is perceived to have worsened in the country within the last one year.
The fresh TI’s new Corruption Perception Index (CPI) says Nigeria scored 25/100 which is one point less than its 26 points in the previous year.
It says Nigeria is now 149 out of 180 countries, a record that is three steps lower than its rank of 146 in 2019.
In the 2018 index, Nigeria rose by four places on the index from 148 to 144.
Assessment
The CPI assessed 180 countries on the basis of perceived corruption in the public sector and not based on opinions of experts and business people.
It assessed countries on a scale of 0 to 100, where 0 is “highly corrupt” and 100 is “very clean”.
According to the latest report, Denmark and New Zealand with 88 points each, are the least perceived corrupt countries, followed by Finland, Singapore and Sweden and Switzerland scoring 85 points each.
War-torn countries like South-Sudan and Somalia ranked the highest countries perceived to be corrupt with 12 points each.
The Nigerian authorities have always criticised the yearly reports, saying TI was oblivious of the achievements of the current administration of President Muhammadu in the fight against corruption.
The Attorney General of the Federation, Abubakar Malami, had said at the release of the last index, that the reports do not corroborate “the facts on the ground”.
“In terms of the fight against corruption, we have been doing more, we have done more, and we will continue to do more out of inherent conviction and desire on our part to fight against corruption devoid of any extraneous considerations relating to the rating by Transparency International,” Mr had Malami argued.
Nigeria is yet to react to the latest ranking which places it as now the second most corrupt country in West Africa with Guinea-Bissau the only country more corrupt than Nigeria in the sub-region.
In Africa, only 12 countries are perceived to be more corrupt than Nigeria. They are Zimbabwe, Chad, Eritrea, Burundi, Congo, Guinea Bissau, Democratic Republic of Congo, Libya, Equatorial Guinea, Sudan, Somalia and South Sudan.
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