On the latest Transparency International ranking released on Tuesday 29th January 2019, Nigeria has moved up four places in the World corruption perception index (CPI) for 2018, ranking 144 out of 180 countries that were surveyed last year.
Nigeria’s score, however, remained the same for the two years at 27/100, a development generally described by Transparency International as showing that anti-corruption efforts have stalled in most countries across the world — at least going by perception.
In a statement released along with the 2018 report on Tuesday morning, Patricia Moreira, managing director of Transparency International, emphasized the need “to do more to strengthen checks and balances and protect citizens’ rights” with many democratic institutions “under threat across the globe”.
The index, which ranks 180 countries and territories by their perceived levels of public sector corruption in the opinion of experts and business people, uses a scale of 0 to 100, where 0 is highly corrupt and 100 is very clean, according to TI.
President Muhammadu Buhari, who came to power on the strength of his anti-corruption credential in 2015, is facing another election next month. The administration has arrested many politicians and government officials and seized their assets, making the movement possible.
Somalia, for the seventh year in a row, remained the country perceived as the most corrupt, followed by South Sudan in Africa.
