THE 2020 Corruption Perception Index (CPI) of the Transparency International (TI) has indicated that corruption in Nigeria is on the increase. In the CPI released today, Thursday, January 28th 2021, Nigeria dropped three places and scored lower in number of points than in its 2019 record, indicating that corruption is perceived to have increased or worsened in the country in the last one year.
As against the 2019 CPI where Nigeria scored 26/100 points, in the current CPI, the country scored 25/100. While Nigeria is placed 149 out of 180 countries in the current ranking, in the 2019 ranking, it ranked 146. In the 2019 ranking, Nigeria was perceived to have improved as it rose from its 2018 low ranking by four places on the perception index, from 148 to 144.
In the current CPI, Denmark and New Zealand, with 88 points each, are the least perceived corrupt countries, followed by Finland, Singapore and Sweden and Switzerland scoring 85 points each.
War-torn countries like South-Sudan and Somalia ranked the highest countries perceived to be corrupt with 12 points each.
The CPI assessment is carried out in 180 countries based on perceived corruption in the public sector and not on opinions of experts and business people. It assessment is on a scale of 0 to 100, where 0 is “highly corrupt” and 100 is “very clean”.
