Nigeria’s overall governance performance has deteriorated increasingly in the last ten years, a new report has shown.
The report, published by the Mo Ibrahim Foundation on African Governance, said Nigeria ranks 34th out of the 54 African countries it reviewed.
The foundation pulled out data from the Ibrahim Index of African Governance (IIAG), a platform that measures and monitors governance performance in all 54 African countries annually.
By the IIAG standards, a country’s performance in delivering governance is measured across four key components: safety and the rule of law, participation and human rights, sustainable economic opportunity, and human development.
According to the report, at least 22 African countries improved in foundations for “economic opportunity and human development,” but Nigeria deteriorated.
Also, Nigeria, South Africa, Eritrea, Cape Verde, and Mauritius witnessed a decline in “security and rule of law and participation, rights and inclusion.”
Similarly, the pace of deterioration in Nigeria regarding “participation, rights and inclusion has worsened over the past decade, at least twice the rate since 2015,” the report showed.
There are plenty of what the report calls “warning signs” for Nigeria, including the following scores:
21/100 for a functioning criminal justice system (ranking in the lowest performing quarter of nations)
25/100 for political party financing
30/100 for disclosure of financial information
35/100 for law enforcement
32/100 for equal political power (ranking us 38th out of 54)
The index further ranked Cape Verde, an island at the fringe of West Africa; east African neighbours, Seychelles and Mauritius; as well as Botswana and Tunisia as the 2019 top-scoring countries.
On the other hand, oil-rich Angola and war-torn Somalia sit afoot the log, but are on a steady path to improvement, the report said.
Further details in the report showed that Africa has improved over the last decade (2010-2019), with more than 60 per cent of Africa’s population in 2019 living in a country where governance has improved since 2010.
“Only eight countries have managed to improve in all four categories over the decade: Angola, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Madagascar, Seychelles, Sudan, and Togo.
“Of these, Ethiopia is the only country to have improved in all 16 sub-categories over the decade.”
The overall assessment said that governance performance is not meeting Africa’s citizens’ growing expectations.
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