The Federal Government, in its typically cantankerous manner, has poured scorn on Transparency International’s 2019 Corruption Perceptions Index report which indicated a slight dip in Nigeria’s rating. But, instead of becoming unnecessarily miffed, this should be an opportune moment for the government to take a more clear-sighted look at the way the anti-graft war has been fought over the years and make amends where necessary.

In what is clearly a renunciation of the report, government agents have been railing that the rating is without any foundation whatsoever and should, therefore, be taken with a pinch of salt. From the Attorney-General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami, to the Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed, it has been a fervent attempt to play down its impact. Regardless of TI’s rating, Malami reasoned, the government would continue to fight corruption “devoid of any extraneous considerations relating to the rating by Transparency International.”

In the same vein, Mohammed said the government had employed various instruments in its bid to tame the “monster called corruption.” He also insisted that the government was not fighting corruption to impress any organisation, but “we are fighting corruption because we believed that without fighting the menace, the much-sought development will not happen and we have results to show for fighting corruption.”

In the TI rating, Nigeria is the 146th least corrupt country out of the 180 surveyed, scoring some measly 26 points out of a possible 100. On a scale of zero to 100 in TI’s rating, zero means “Highly Corrupt,” while 100 stands for “Very Clean.” This means that the country is two steps worse off than she was the previous year, when she scored 27 points to place 144th out of 180 countries. The summation is simply that corruption in the country has worsened.

For a government that rode to power on the promise of tackling the endemic corruption in the country, this has come as a debilitating blow. The blow is doubly damaging because the President, Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd.), is also saddled with an African Union mandate to raise awareness about corruption on the continent.

When Buhari mounted the saddle for his first term in 2015, Nigeria was ranked the 136th least corrupt country out of the 176 surveyed. She scored 27 points to achieve that feat. But since then, the country’s rating has been oscillating between 26 and 27 points. That is why this year’s ranking could be taken as a vote of no confidence in all the measures the regime has taken so far concerning corruption.

By this verdict, Nigeria also finds herself as the second most corrupt country in the ECOWAS region. TI’s CPI ranks countries according to their perceived level of public sector corruption in the opinion of experts and business people. Only Guinea-Bissau, at 168, is ranked below Nigeria in West Africa, where Cape Verde and Senegal lead the pack as the 41st and 66th least corrupt respectively. But the top rung is dominated by Denmark and New Zealand as cleanest, with 87 points each. Both the United Kingdom and the United States are placed 12th and 23rd with 77 and 69 points respectively.

Nigeria’s poor ranking does not, however, mean that the country has not made some efforts to curb corruption. In fact, innovative ideas such as the Treasury Single Account and the Whistle-blower concepts have had some tremendous impact on the war against graft. So also has the deployment of the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System to clean up workers’ payroll, which is often padded with fictitious names to defraud the government.

But there are also a lot that is happening in Nigeria to affect people’s perception about the level of corruption in the country. For example, when political office holders earn emoluments that are known only to them, it becomes very difficult for the government to say it is running a transparent system. The federal lawmakers are reputed to be among the highest paid of their type in the world, yet nobody knows exactly how much they earn.

The same goes for state governors who collect huge sums of money, sometimes running into billions of naira, as security votes; yet, they don’t account for such money. That is certainly the kind of corruption that cannot be found in places like Finland and Singapore, which finished third and fourth least corrupt respectively in the latest CPI.

Also tainting the image of the country is the padding of the budget by both civil servants and the lawmakers, who claim to use theirs for the prosecution of fraudulent and corruption-ridden constituency projects. With N1 trillion spent on constituency projects in the past 10 years, according to Buhari, there has been nothing on the ground to justify the amount. On a daily basis, Nigerians still come across police and other security personnel taking bribes openly. Corruption in public service is yet to abate.

By the same token, the Office of the Auditor-General for the Federation submits its reports to the National Assembly every year without any consideration of them by the lawmakers. There is no way a country can claim to be fighting corruption without a thorough scrutiny of the Auditor-General’s report. Generally, bribery is rife in Nigerian public institutions, just as election rigging has not abated.

Besides, the government has been boasting that certain top politicians, including a few former governors and serving senators, have been convicted; but these are very few and far between. In many cases, it has taken more than a decade to secure judgement. There are some former governors whose cases are still pending with the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission after close to one and a half decades.

The Nigerian authorities have to employ technology in many areas of public life to increase efficiency and reduce human interface to substantially degrade corruption. The idea of special courts should be expedited to ensure that serious corruption cases do not last more than six months. Nigeria’s rating will only improve when people have the feeling that the government is serious about fighting corruption.