A new Corruption Perception Index (CPI) released by Transparency International (TI) has ranked Nigeria 154 of 180 countries sampled methodically.
The organisation, in its latest report said Nigeria dropped one place, compared to the 2020 CPI results.
The report showed that Nigeria scored 24 out of 100 points in the 2021 CPI, falling back one point, compared to the 2020 CPI.
A country’s CPI score is the perceived level of public sector corruption on a scale of 0-100, where 0 means highly corrupt and 100 means very clean.
The latest ranking indicates that corruption in the country has gotten worse over the years.
Country Representative of TI, Auwal Musa Rafsanjani, blamed the decline on corruption in the public sector.
Rafsanjani, who is also the Executive Director of Civil Society Legislative Advocacy Centre, (CISLAC), noted that corruption in Nigeria has greatly contributed to the nation’s underdevelopment.
The TI rep stressed that despite successive governments claiming to fight corruption, job opportunities, driver’s licence acquisition, passport applications, among others, were still frost with corrupt tendencies, especially as officials in charge of these basic services expect some form of kickbacks while rendering such duties.
He claimed that corruption was responsible for rising insecurity, high unemployment rate and systemic failure in healthcare delivery and leadership dysfunctions.
Rafsanjani said: “The CPI aggregates data from eight different sources that provide perceptions by country experts and business people on the level of corruption in the public sector.
“While the index does not show specific incidences of corruption in the country, it indicates the perception of corruption in Nigeria. The index is completely impartial but objective and globally acknowledged as the most widely used cross country parameter for measuring corruption.”
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