Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo on Tuesday took an optimistic look at the poor rating of Nigeria on the recently-released Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index 2017.
He said the rating was not a setback for Nigeria, but an encouragement for the country to work harder and plug loopholes.
The Transparency International’s report released on February 21, scored Nigeria 27 per cent and ranked it 148th out of the 180 countries assessed.
The organisation said Nigeria’s latest result was worse than that of 2016 wherein the country was ranked 136th with a score of 28 per cent.
In the 2017 rankings, Nigeria shares the 148th spot with Comoros and Guinea.
But the Vice-President said Nigeria’s rating dropped because the country had a low score in “just one out of the nine internationally-recognised indexes” used by the organisation.
He said while the index scored Nigeria low on the Economist Intelligence Unit Country Risk Service, with a decline from 37 points to 20 points, the country either remained stable or improved on its scores for all the other eight indexes used in the CPI ranking.
Osinbajo said the government was not discouraged by the TI’s report.
He insisted that “real progress” was being made in the nation’s fight against corruption, noting that perception, which the TI’s report was all about, could sometimes lag behind reality.
He however added that sometimes too, perception could be stronger than reality, hence the need “to keep up the fight, until the full effect of our efforts can be clearly seen and perceived.”