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Nigeria has slipped two places to 142nd out of 182 countries in the 2025 Transparency International (TI) Corruption Perception Index, extending its run of poor performance on the global anti-corruption ranking.
In the 2024 index, the country ranked 140 out of 180 countries with a score of 26 out of 100.
The addition of two countries in the latest rankings saw Nigeria maintain its score of 26 despite dropping two places.
Ranks can change if the number of countries included in the index changes, but a country’s score is the perceived level of public sector corruption on a scale of 0-100, where 0 means highly corrupt and 100 means very clean.
TI released the 2025 index on Tuesday.
In its latest report, sub-Saharan Africa was the lowest performing region with an average score of 32 out of 100.
Only four of the 49 countries scored above 50.
At 68, Seychelles remains the region’s highest scorer, followed by Cabo Verde (62), Botswana (58) and Rwanda (58).
The lowest scorers include Sudan (14), Eritrea (13), Somalia (9) and South Sudan (9).
Nigeria’s progress in tackling corruption, despite President Bola Tinubu’s repeated pledge to tackle the menace, has been slow.
In 2022, the country scored 24 out of 100 and ranked 150th; while in 2021, it scored the same but placed 154th — its worst performance under former President Muhammadu Buhari.
Nigeria’s best performance in the last decade was in 2016 when it ranked 136th and had a score of 28.
Paul Banoba, regional advisor for Africa at TI, said public sector corruption always hits the most vulnerable people hardest.
“African governments need to urgently translate anti-corruption commitments into decisive action by further strengthening accountability institutions and increasing transparency, protecting civic space and supporting the public,” Banoba said.
In 2024, the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) controversially named Tinubu a finalist for its ‘Corrupt Person of the Year’ award.
