Out of 180 countries, Guyana ranks #83 on corruption index

Jan 29, 2021 News

Kaieteur News – Guyana is still perceived as a highly corrupt nation according to Transparency International in its 2020 Corruption Index Report.
Out of 180 nations that were assessed for perceptions of corruption last year, Guyana came in at the 83rd position with a score of 41 out of 100 alongside Southern African country, Lesotho, and the French-speaking West African nation, Benin.
The CPI scores 180 countries and territories by their perceived levels of public sector corruption, according to experts and business people, using a scale of 0-100 whereby 100 is very clean and 0 is highly corrupt.
This year’s Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) paints a grim picture of the state of corruption worldwide and while most countries have made little to no progress in tackling corruption in nearly a decade, the report outlined that more than two-thirds of countries scored below 50.
In addition to earning poor scores, nearly half of all countries have been stagnant on the CPI for almost a decade, failing to move the needle in any significant way to improve their score and combat public sector corruption, the report outlined.
The top countries on the CPI are Denmark and New Zealand, with scores of 88, followed by Finland, Singapore, Sweden and Switzerland, with scores of 85 each. The bottom countries are South Sudan and Somalia, with scores of 12 each, followed by Syria with 14, Yemen with 15 and Guyana’s neighbour Venezuela with a score of 15 as well.
Guyana had made significant progress in 2019 ranking at 85 with a score of 40, a vast improvement from the previous years.
According to TI, analysis shows that corruption not only undermines the global health response to COVID-19, but contributes to a continuing crisis of democracy.
It said “As the past tumultuous year has shown, COVID-19 is not just a health and economic crisis, but a corruption crisis as well, with countless lives lost due to the insidious effects of corruption undermining a fair and equitable global response” with reports of corruption during COVID-19 reverberating globally.
Moreover, the organization pointed out that the emergency response to the COVID-19 pandemic revealed “enormous cracks in health systems and democratic institutions,” underscoring that those in power or who hold government purse strings often serve their own interests instead of those most vulnerable.
And as the global community transitions from crisis to recovery, it said that anticorruption efforts must keep pace ensuring a fair and just revival.

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