PREMIUM TIMES
The Editor-in-Chief/Chief Operating Officer of PREMIUM TIMES Nigeria, Musikilu Mojeed, has said that corruption is largely responsible for rampant poverty and instability in the West African sub-region.
Mr Mojeed stated this recently while speaking to members of the Rotary Club of Accra-North in Ghana, a West African country.
Speaking on the topic, “Stealing from the poor: The West Africa’s corruption epidemic,” the award-winning investigative journalist lamented that West Africans had been “sufficiently impoverished” by the political class.
The editor-in-chief, who is Nigeria’s Country President of the International Press Institute, stressed that the major problem affecting the sub-region stems from corruption and that if an immediate action was not taken to reverse the situation, the sub-region and Africa could be doomed.
He urged members to put pressure on the governments to fight corruption just like they fought the dreaded wild polio virus to a halt.
“Tackling corruption is very important because it is at the root of almost all the problems we are having in the sub-region. Part of the problem of the rampant poverty and instability in the sub-region is largely due to corruption,” he said.
‘Most corrupt in the world’
Mr Mojeed, citing recent reports from the United Nations Office for Drugs and Crimes (UNODC) and Transparency International (TI), said the sub-region was the most corrupt in the entire world.
“The Corruption Perception Index provides the scores of every country from zero to 100 and over 180 countries are ranked. If a country scores between 100 – 80, it can be said to be clean. But African countries have usually been shown to be highly corrupt,” he stated.
Apart from Cape Verde which scored 60 per cent, the editor-in-chief said no other West African country scored up to 50 per cent and that none was in the top 70, adding that the 2021 ranking of the subregion was equally poor.
“Perhaps, I might be telling you what you already know but we can never get tired talking about corruption. Apart from TI index, UNODC also released a report in 2022, indicating that despite the National Anti-Corruption Action Plan adopted in 2014, corruption remains rampant in Ghana and most of West African (countries) and Africa. But that of West Africa is much more endemic,” he said.
“Under the prevalence of bribery, the UNODC report indicates that 26.7 per cent of adult Ghanaians paid a bribe to a public official in 2021. That’s huge. The report went on to report the prevalence of bribery by the employment status of bribe payers, meaning that even when you’re employed, you still must pay the bribe to get service. Under salaried employed persons in the private sector, 37.8 per cent said they paid a bribe to get service,” Mr Mojeed added.
He said the report showed that police officers were the most corrupt, followed by the Ghana Immigration Service and the Ghana Revenue Authority, adding that Ghana has a number of high-profile corruption cases being handled by the country’s Office of the Special Prosecutor.