By Uche Mbah
For the second time running, the United Nations declared that Nigerians spent a whopping N675 billion in bribes in the year ending 2019. This, however, decreased 2.2 % from the last time the assessment was made, which was 2016.
A survey by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), indicate that this was 0.5 % of the Gross Domestic Product of the the country within the year under review.
This came at a time Wikipedia added Nigeria to the list of the World’s failed states in an update. Other countries listed are Syria, Somalia, Myanmar, Iraq, Yemen, Turkey, Democratic Republic of Congo, Central African Republic, Rwanda, Liberia, Yugoslavia, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Sudan, and South Sudan.
In the survey titled, “Corruption in Nigeria: patterns and trends,” the UN agency noted that “Out of all Nigerian citizens who had at least one contact with a public official in the 12 months, prior to the 2019 survey, 30.2 per cent paid a bribe to, or were asked to pay a bribe by, a public official. This means that although still relatively high, the prevalence of bribery in Nigeria has undergone a moderate, yet statistically significant, decrease since 2016, when it stood at 32.3 per cent.”
Resorting to zonal analysis, the Agency said the zones recorded a decrease in bribery from the 2016 figures, adding that the southern zones, with the exception of the south-west, recorded a decrease in bribery.
“Three out of the country’s six zones (North-East, North-West and South-West) have recorded decreases in the prevalence of bribery since 2016, with the North-West experiencing a considerable (and statistically significant) decline in the prevalence of bribery, from 36 to 25 per cent, while the two other zones recorded smaller decreases. By contrast, the North-Central, South-East and South-South zones recorded further increases in the prevalence of bribery from 2016 to 2019”, it said, adding that this did not in reality decrease the frequencies of Bribe taking.
“Although a smaller percentage of Nigerians that had contact with public officials paid bribes, or were asked to pay bribes, those who did pay bribes continued to do so quite frequently: in 2019, Nigerian bribe-payers paid an average of six bribes in the 12 months prior to the survey, or one bribe every two months, which is virtually the same as the average of 5.8 bribes paid per bribe-payer in 2016”, the report said.
