This is a big bowl to the government of president Muhammadu Buhari and his anti-corruption campaign.
The latest corruption perception index (CPI) released by Transparency International shows corruption is getting worse in Nigeria.
In the new report, Nigeria ranked 148 out of 180 countries surveyed across the world. The new position is a 12 places down from from the country’s ranking in 2016 (136). This has been considered a blow to the anti-corruption campaign of the current administration.
President Muhammadu Buhari has made fighting corruption a main policy of his government, thus making this new rating bad for the country. However, some successes have been achieved and a lot of stolen funds recovered, but the government has also been accused of letting-go some officials found to have engaged in activities regarded as corruption.
The latest ranking puts Nigeria as the 32nd most corruption in Africa.
One of the Nigerian contacts of TI during this survey, Civil Society Legislative Advocacy Centre (CISLAC) said this is a major setback for anti-graft war in Nigeria.
“This fresh setback in the fight against corruption confirms that grand-corruption, political corruption, nepotism, favouritism and bribery 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 taxpayers around 25% of annual GDP."
"Since the current administration has come to power on the anti-corruption ticket, no significant politically exposed person has been duly sentenced on anti-corruption charges,” the body added.
CPI is an annual index computated for 180 countries across the world to assess the level of public sector corruption in these countries. The index for a country is done by aggregating the opinions of experts and business people operating within it. All countries are placed on a scale of 0 to 100, where 0 is highly corrupt and 100 is very clean.