The Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed, has frowned at Transparency International’s, TI, 2020 Corruption Perception Index, CPI, report, where it rated Nigeria as the second most corrupt country in West Africa, and the worst corrupt the country has been since 2015, when President Muhammadu Buhari took Office, .
Lai Mohammed argued that the report does not truly reflect the great strides by the President Buhari administration in its fight against corruption.
The Minister also stated that he believes that there are missing assessments for Nigeria in the data entries where the country has performed well in previous CPI calculations, which has now affected the overall rating of the country, over a period of time.
He made this known in a statement issued in Abuja, on Sunday, while assuring Nigerians that the country’s anti-corruption agenda, which has placed great emphasis on corruption prevention measures, and the building of integrity systems, remains on course.
The Minister of Information further lamented on the “under-reporting of our ongoing corruption reduction measures”.
He said that having analysed the 2020 rating for Nigeria by TI, the Federal 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.
His words: “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 also said that 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.”
Lai Mohammed added that there are missing assessments for Nigeria, in the data entries where the country has performed well in previous CPI calculations, like the African Development Bank Country Policy and Institutional Assessment.
“There is a need to understand why scores for this assessment have not been recorded for Nigeria for the past two years, which 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.”
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