Nigeria’s Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed, has faulted the Transparency International Corruption Perception Index (TI-CPI) rating for Nigeria, saying that it does not truly reflect the great strides by the country in its fight against corruption.
Reacting to the 149 rating of Nigeria, the Minister said that the assessments for Nigeria in the data entries where the country performed well in previous CPI calculations were missing and that affected the overall rating of Nigeria over a period of time.
In a statement issued in Abuja on Sunday, the Minister assured Nigerians that the country’s anti-corruption agenda, which has placed great emphasis on corruption prevention measures and the building of integrity systems, was on course.
In the 2020 index released on Thursday, Nigeria scored 25 out of 100 points, dropping to 149 out of the 180 countries surveyed.
He lamented the under-reporting of the ongoing corruption reduction measures of the government, saying that a number of efforts were being made on the part of the government to curb corruption in the country.
The Minister disclosed that having analyzed the 2020 TI-CPI rating for Nigeria, the government is interrogating a number of 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 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 absence of current data,” he said.
According to the Minister, different assessments on the same indicators (for instance corruption in the bureaucracy) by different rating institutions have generated different scores and different rankings across the ranking agencies
“There is a need to understand why these variations occur, and consequently the robustness of the methodology and validity of data,” he said.
GIK/APA