Nigeria, Other Oil Exporting Countries Rank High On Corruption Index

ALLAFRICA
THISDAY (Nigeria) [06/12/12]

Photo: http://www.vanguard.com

Corruption in Nigeria  (SOURCE: http://allafrica.com)

The 2012 Transparency International (TI) Corruption Perception Index (CBI) released Wednesday showed that Nigeria, Russia and other oil exporting countries are more corrupt than they 'should be'.

The TI survey showed that Russia only scored one point (28) above Nigeria (27) "on the 0 (very corrupt) to 100 (very clean scale).

In fact, a report by RenCap titled: 'Will anti-corruption Legislation Prolong Corruption?' which was focused on the TI survey, revealed that 18 energy exporting countries featured among the 25 countries that were measured to be more corrupt in the TI survey than per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) measures suggested they should be.

It stated that Equatorial Guinea and Kuwait were the worst on the CPI, with scores of least 30 points lower on the 100-point scale than their peers.

"The next-worst include Turkmenistan and Venezuela, but also Greece, Italy and Afghanistan - each 20-29 points lower than their peers. The remaining countries in the 25 include Iraq, Kazakhstan, Russia, Kazakhstan and Ukraine. As we have argued before, these are countries in which debt investors may feel more comfortable, as they can bypass corruption problems by dealing in international courts when things go wrong," RenCap said.

But the report, which acknowledged that the TI survey is probably the most widely cited survey on the subject, however pointed out that the Index may be "self-fuelling."

It explained: "If you read that a country does poorly in the index, you will probably perceive the country as corrupt; and if surveyed, you might say you think the country is corrupt, so it then does poorly in the index, which the media then pick up. But we all like rankings, and the TI survey gives scope for great headlines."

For Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) it however said that most of the major markets improved on the survey. Russia was up 10 places, Kenya is up 15 places, Nigeria is up four places and Turkey is up seven places. Only South Africa is down (dropping five places).

But RenCap argued: "We believe these rankings are misleading, as they fail to account for their strong link to per capita GDP. Put very simply, if you are rich, you get a high transparency score (low corruption) and if you are poor, you suffer from a lot of corruption. The average score for the 10 richest countries with per capita GDP in 2011 of $50,000 or more (in current 2011 dollars) is 82/100.

"We use the International Monetary Fund (IMF) data for 2011 per capita, because 2012 data are only estimates. The average score for the 32 poorest countries with per capita GDP of less than $1,000 is 28/100. If perceptions of corruption are so closely linked to per capita GDP, then what is interesting is not how corrupt a country is: we can estimate that fairly accurately from the per capita GDP data. What is interesting is whether a country is less or more corrupt than it should be, relative to its peers with similar per capita GDP rankings."