Nigeria has recorded an improved ranking in the Corruption Perception Index, CPI released on Tuesday by Transparency International, moving five places up to rank 145 out of 180 countries assessed.
Apart from moving five places up from its one hundred and fiftieth position, Nigeria also gained one point added to its previous twenty- four, ending up scoring twenty-five out of the one hundred maximum points in the 2023 corruption perception index, CPI results.
The Corruption Perception Index, arguably the most widely used global corruption ranking in the world, measures how corrupt each country’s Public Sector is investigated to be.
The CPI uses a scale of zero to one hundred, where the zero means ‘highly corrupt’ and the one hundred means ‘very clean’.
According to Transparency International, Nigeria’s slight improvement in points scored places it below the Sub-Saharan African average of thirty- three points.
Seychelles’ 71 score in the Corruption Perception Index remains the top scorer in the region, followed by Cape Verde with 64 and Botswana 59 points.
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Equatorial Guinea scored 17, South Sudan has 13 and Somalia with 11 points, performed the lowest with no sign of improvement.
Nigeria shares its 145th position in the 2023 Corruption Perception Index with Liberia, Madagascar and Mozambique.
Anti-corruption experts say, cases of corruption and related challenges in justice systems in the region range from reports of bribery, to extortion and political interference in justice systems of countries like Nigeria, to the dismissal and imprisonment of magistrates accused of corruption in Burundi and the denial of justice for victims of human rights violations in the Democratic Republic of Congo, are examples that underscore the justice system’s crucial role in safeguarding basic human rights and social equity.
These experts added that the 2023 CPI shows that countries in Sub-Saharan Africa have a long way to go in their fight against corruption.
(Editor: Ken Eseni)
