The issue of vote buying has become a nationwide trend with one out of every five Nigerians involved in the practice, a new research has revealed.

The research, conducted by United Nations Office of Drugs and Crimes, (UNODC), showed that vote buying was prevalent in all geopolitical zones of the country in the last three years.

National consultant of UNODC Dr Adebusuyi Adeniran presented the report at the 17th anti-corruption situation room organised in Lagos by the Human and Environmental Development Agenda (HEDA Resource Centre) in collaboration with MacArthur Foundation and PTCIJ.

The survey titled, ‘Corruption Trends in Nigeria: Evidence from the 2nd Survey on Bribery and Other Forms of Corruption in the Public Sector’, also said bribery in Nigeria is less prevalent in 2019 than it was in 2016 decreasing from 32 per cent to 30.2 per cent.

The report revealed that the prevalence of bribery may have decreased but the frequency of bribe-paying has not.

Adeniran said though the decrease in the prevalence of bribery by less than two per cent was “not really big”, it was a form of improvement.

Giving the geographical spread of the prevalence, he said the North Central recorded the highest increase in bribery in 2019 with Kogi State leading, adding that the North West recorded the largest decrease.

A further breakdown of the report according to states showed that Kogi recorded the highest prevalence of 48 per cent; Gombe 45; Rivers 43 and Adamawa 41 per cent.

States with the lowest prevalence are Imo 17.6%; Jigawa, 18.5%; Kano, 18.9% and Plateau 20.6.

Chairman of the occasion, Prof. Shehu Abdullahi, called for empowerment of civil society to demand for accountability but this must be done on the principles of “he who comes to equity must come with clean hands.”

“They must watch their activities and ensure that they do everything objectively,” he added. According to him, there should be an objective and less sentimental measure of the progress made so far in the fight against corruption.

Project Manager of HEDA Sina Odugbemi said the situation room was an opportunity for civil society to appreciate the enormity of corruption based on the available empirical data. He said corruption remains an elephant which must be tackled. (Daily Trust)

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