The Civil Society Legislative Advocacy Centre, CISLAC, has announced its corruption ratings for 2022.
The Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) is an annual ranking since 1995 that was developed by Transparency International to rate the prevalence of corruption in each country of the world.
The 2022 edition is developed in conjunction with CISLAC, which is the national chapter of Transparency International in Nigeria.
The index, which is published exclusively in Nigeria by CISLAC, aims to serve as a basis for critical reflection on tangible ways to strengthen the fight against corruption.
Samuel Asimi, the facilitator, began the launch by educating the guests on the essence of Transparency International and all that the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) stands to achieve.
Asimi proceeded to talk about the data rank and how it is sourced and analyzed.
Asimi added that corruption cannot be analyzed in its entirety.
Asimi proceeded to Review the Nigerian CPI scores and CPI rank from 2020/2021, this CPI methodology was adopted in 2012.
In 2021 Nigeria had a score of 28 and ranked as 154 in a total of 180 countries. He stated that this is not a good report as Nigeria has remained on the same level and it means no improvements have been made.
A session was organized to allow guests to ask questions on the scope and accuracy of the Corruption Performance Index over the past few years.
(A guest asked a question on how these sources can be trusted seeing as in 2022 when the 2021 index was launched it had a lot of backlash and also had people say it was flawed, Asimi did well to answer the question graciously and stated that they were aware of the backlash last year and provided necessary examples to how these sources can be trusted “To rank data countries must have at least 3 data sources from the standard 13 sources, in Nigeria, 8 data sources were used to analyze the CPI” he said
In a panel session afterwards, Executive Director Auwal Rafsanjani disclosed that the intentions of the CPI was never to cause harm but to draw attention to the prevalence of corruption in the country and to help make corrections where necessary.
Mr Rafsanjani added that some corrupt government officials had previously berated the CPI’s models and denied the pervasive nature of corruption in the country only to get arrested days and months later on issues that bordered on corruption.
Mr Rafsanjani finds it disappointing that journalists who put their lives on the line to extract information are not compensated enough or provided with life insurance their counterparts in well-developed climes enjoy.
According to Rafsanjani, anti-corruption bodies are hounded, instead of being celebrated, in the country.
“We hope with the new government coming in, we are able to fix a lot of things in the country and push away the corrupt people in government,” He said.
