BY LINUS CHIBUIKE
THE Federal Government has said Nigeria’s low rating in the 2020 Transparency International Corruption Perception Index (TI-CPI) does not truly reflect the great strides by the country in its fight against corruption.
It said there were missing assessments for Nigeria in the data entries where the country had performed well in previous CPI calculations, like the African Development Bank Country Policy and Institutional Assessment.
This is contained in a statement issued in Abuja on Sunday by the Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed.
”There is the need to understand why scores for this assessment have not been recorded for Nigeria for the past two years.
“This has had the effect of reducing Nigeria’s cumulative score and ranking relative to countries with those scores included in their CPI for both years,” the Minister said.
He said having analysed the 2020 TI-CPI rating for Nigeria, the Federal Government was interrogating a number of issues and discrepancies that had been observed in the rating processes.
“These included 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, the need to verify that there is no transposition of figures from year to year due to absence of current data,” the minister said.
He however noted that Nigeria’s anti-corruption agenda, which had placed great emphasis on corruption prevention measures and the building of integrity systems remained on course.
According to him, the implementation of the various reforms, especially in the Ease of Doing Business was expected to yield positive outcomes in the country’s corruption perception and other relevant assessments in the next 12 to 24 months.
He stated, ”For instance, following the release of the 2019 TI-Corruption Perception Index, the government initiated reforms to improve on Nigeria’s Ease of Doing Business indices.
“This is because we found that up to 40 per cent of the country’s corruption perception survey indices relates to business processes and general public service delivery processes.
“Government’s swift action has led to major reforms in the processes at our ports and business process points.”
The Minister added that in addition to placing more emphasis on corruption prevention measures and building of integrity systems, high profile corruption cases were currently under investigation and prosecution.
He said the emphasis on preventive mechanisms was in response to various local and international reviews and evaluation that Nigeria had gone through, including those from the United Nations Convention Against Corruption (UNCAC) and even from the TI-CPI.
”In response to these evaluations, a number of significant policies have been instituted to enhance transparency and accountability and prevent corruption.
“Even in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, a number of key transparency and accountability policies were developed and are currently being implemented,” he said.
He listed the key accountability and transparency policies to include the launch by the ICPC, of the National Ethics Policy, which he said addressed integrity issues in all sectors of the polity.
Mohammed said the policy was directly linked to a key pillar of the National Anti-Corruption Strategy (NACS), Ethical Reorientation; efforts by the Code of Conduct Bureau (CCB) to energise the Code of Conduct for Public Officers (CCPO).
Also the launch of the Nigerian Port Process Manual (NPPM) was ultimately aimed at sustaining Nigeria’s improvement in the Ease of Doing business, he said.
”While we expect the results from these reforms to speak for us in due course, we are also taking measures to improve our data collection and retrieval on these issues to reduce the current under-reporting of our ongoing corruption reduction measures,” he added.
In the recent TI CPI released on Friday, Nigeria scored 25/100 which was one point less than its 26 points in the previous year.
It said Nigeria was now 149 out of 180 countries, three steps lower than its 146 ranking in 2019.
