In Nige­ria, efforts to fight cor­rup­tion have been increas­ing by each suc­ces­sive gov­ern­ment. How­ever, the amount of cor­rup­tion that goes on has increased as well. Nige­ria actu­ally has a lot of anti-corruption laws on the books, but the prob­lem only seems to worsen.

From the Van­guard, cor­rup­tion expert Dr. Peter Langsett weighed in on the problem.

An Anti-Corruption expert, Dr. Peter Langsett who stated this at a two-day Anti-Corruption and Finan­cial Crimes Sum­mit in Abuja, main­tained that unless there is a con­sid­er­able improve­ment in the per-capita income of the aver­age cit­i­zenry, cor­rup­tion would con­tinue to under­mine the socio-economic and polit­i­cal devel­op­ment of the country.

While advo­cat­ing for the estab­lish­ment of State Anti-Corruption agen­cies to com­ple­ment the efforts of the Eco­nomic and Finan­cial Crimes Com­mis­sion (EFCC) and the Inde­pen­dent Cor­rupt Prac­tices and Other Related Offences Com­mis­sion (ICPC), Dr.Langsett tasked these anti-graft agen­cies to be more proac­tive and to go after those he described as the ‘big fishes’ whom he said should be held respon­si­ble for not only plun­der­ing the nation’s econ­omy but for the geo­met­ric rise in poverty induced crimes in the coun­try today.

Accord­ing to him, “it is a pity that a recent sur­vey indi­cated that Nigeria’s GDP per cap­i­tal, is much lower than what obtained in the 1970’s due to cor­rup­tion which is a major pred­i­cate of money laun­der­ing, what baf­fles me how­ever, is that this coun­try has the high­est num­ber of laws and anti-graft insti­tu­tions in the whole world.”

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