Nigeria's slight improvement in points scored places it below the Sub-Saharan African average of 33 points.
Nigeria has recorded an improved ranking in the Corruption Perception Index (CPI) released on Tuesday by Transparency International (TI), moving five places up to rank 145 out of 180 countries assessed.
Apart from moving five places up from its 150th position, the country also gained one point added to its previous 24, ending up scoring 25 out of the 100 maximum points in the 2023 CPI results.
The CPI, arguably the most widely used global corruption ranking in the world, measures how corrupt each country's public sector is perceived to be.
It uses a scale of zero to 100, where zero means "highly corrupt", and 100 means very clean".
"Small fluctuations or changes in a country's CPI score are not usually significant," says the TI, a Berlin-based non-profit and non-governmental organisation concerned with ending corruption in the countries and territories of the world.
According to TI, Nigeria's slight improvement in points scored, places below the Sub-Saharan African average of 33 points.
Seychelles (CPI score: 71) remains the top scorer in the region, followed by Cabo Verde (64) and Botswana (59).
Equatorial Guinea (17), South Sudan (13) and Somalia (11) perform the lowest with no sign of improvement.
Nigeria shares its 145th position in the 2023 CPI with Liberia, Madagascar and Mozambique.
"Cases of corruption and related challenges in justice systems in the region range from reports of bribery to extortion and political interference in justice systems of countries like Nigeria (25), to the dismissal and imprisonment of magistrates accused of corruption in Burundi (20), and all the way to the denial of justice for victims of human rights violations in the Democratic Republic of Congo (20).
"These examples underscore the justice system's crucial role in safeguarding basic human rights and social equity," wrote Paul Banoba, Robert Mwanyumba and Samuel Kaninda, Regional Advisors for Africa, Transparency International.
The experts said the 2023 CPI shows that countries in Sub-Saharan Africa have a long way to go in their fight against corruption.
Nigeria had recorded an improvement in the previous 2022 CPI, moving up to 150th compared to its 154th position out of 180 countries assessed in the 2022 rankings.
The improved ranking was not accounted for by gaining additional points. It moved up four places despite maintaining its previous score of 24 out of 100 points in the 2021 assessment.
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