Nigeria has fallen four places from 154 out of 180 countries and territories, to 150 in the latest ranking of the 2022 Corruption Perceptions Index released by Transparency International on Tuesday.
Although the country maintained its previous score of 24 out of 100 points in 2022, it currently sits at 150.
According to the Civil Society Legislative Advocacy Centre, which aggregated data from eight different, the latest ranking on the level of corruption in the public sector, indicates that the CPI index for the country has remained consistently low in the last 10 years, while the lack of transparency in Nigeria’s security sector has weakened the country.
The ranking which comes less than a month before Nigeria’s general election is not intended to make Nigeria look bad or unresponsive to the corruption challenge, according to the Executive Director, Civil Society Legislative Advocacy Centre (CISLAC), AUWAL Rafsanjani.
The group further asked the electoral body, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to play its role in ensuring the smooth conduct of the elections in a fair and free manner and according to the Electoral Act.
Reacting to the report, The Minister of Information, Lai Mohammed, faulted Nigeria’s rating in the Transparency International Corruption Perception Index (TI-CPI), saying it does not truly reflect the great strides by the country in its fight against corruption.
The Minister also believes that there are missing assessments for Nigeria in the data entries where the country has performed well in previous CPI calculations, which has now affected the overall rating of the country over some time.
He made this known in a statement issued in Abuja on Sunday while assuring Nigerians that the country’s anti-corruption agenda, which has placed great emphasis on corruption prevention measures and the building of integrity systems, remains on course.
He said having analyzed the 2020 TI-CPI rating for Nigeria, the Federal Government is interrogating several issues and discrepancies that have been observed in the rating process, including some data sources in which Nigeria’s scores have remained flat over the past 10 years, reflecting no improvement, decline or fluctuation.
“This is very improbable given the nature of the behaviour of variables, which are normally influenced by a variety of factors (which is the reason they are called ‘variables’). In this case, the corruption scores would have been affected by changes in the size and structure of the public sector over the past 10 years, changes in policies and personnel and systems over the period including, for instance, process automation, etc. There is therefore a need to verify that there is no transposition of figures from year to year due to the absence of current data,” the Minister said.
He went further to state that, “There is a need to understand why these variations occur, and consequently the robustness of the methodology and validity of data,” adding that there are missing assessments for Nigeria in the data entries where the country has performed well in previous CPI calculations, like the African Development Bank Country Policy and Institutional Assessment.
“There is a need to understand why scores for this assessment have not been recorded for Nigeria for the past two years, which has had the effect of reducing Nigeria’s cumulative score and ranking relative to countries with those scores included in their CPI for both years,” he said.
