Latest corruption index, an indication of Buhari’s failure – CISLAC

Nigeria’s abysmal performance in the latest ranking of Transparency International index of most corrupt countries in the world has been described as worrying as it reflects the inability of President Buhari’s administration to combat corruption like he promised when he was campaigning in 2015.

In the latest ranking released on Wednesday, Nigeria dropped 12 places from 136^th in 2016 to 148^th. On the African continent, Nigeria ranks 32nd position in Africa out of 52 assessed countries in 2017.

Nigeria is jointly ranked alongside Guinea and Comoros, while Botswana, Rwanda, Namibia and Kenya ranked above Nigeria occupying 34^th, 48^th, 53^rd and 143^rd respectively.

This drop comes despite the country’s improved overall CPI score of 28/100 which is one point more than 2016’s 27/100.

Reacting to the abysmal performance of the country in this latest ranking, the Civil Society Legislative Advocacy Centre (CISLAC), which is Transparency International’s national contact in Nigeria, said the latest ranking is a reflection of the fact that grand-corruption; political corruption, nepotism, favoritism and bribery still persist in Nigeria at all levels.

“It is CISLAC’s view that the negative perception is mainly a consequence of the inability to combat grand corruption and astronomical plundering of public coffers costing the Nigerian tax payers around 25% of annual GDP.

“On the African continent, Nigeria ranks 32nd position in Africa out of 52 assessed countries in 2017. While Botswana leads the continent with the record of competent and largely corruption-free public administration, Nigeria hopelessly falls behind with 27 points. In West Africa, Nigeria is the second worst country out of 17 countries leaving only Guinea Bissau behind.

CISLAC argued that the since the present administration came to power on the anti-corruption ticket, no significant politically exposed person has been duly sentenced on anti-corruption charges.

Meanwhile, New Zealand is ranked as the least corrupt nation in the world with an 89/100 CPI score, with Denmark (88/100) trailing at second and Finland, Norway, and Switzerland joint third.

The corruption perception index (CPI) released on Wednesday ranked 180 countries and territories by their perceived levels of public sectorcorruption in the opinion of experts and business people and uses a scale of 0 to 100, where 0 is highly corrupt and 100 is very clean.