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Nigerians urged to shun corruption, imbibe integrity for sustainable growth

By Helen Oji
13 December 2019   |   4:02 am
An integrity expert has stressed the need for Nigeria to shun corruption and imbibe integrity in the business environment and governance practice to accelerate the nation’s growth in a sustainable manner.

Co-founder, The Convention on Business Integrity, Soji Apampa

An integrity expert has stressed the need for Nigeria to shun corruption and imbibe integrity in the business environment and governance practice to accelerate the nation’s growth in a sustainable manner.

According to the expert, corruption would damage Nigeria’s business relations with other countries if the ‘cankerworm’ is not eliminated in the system.

The Co-founder, The Convention on Business Integrity, Soji Apampa, at the launch of the National Integrity Barometer held in Lagos recently, said: “If we fail to do something, our whole window on trade and commerce with the rest of the world may close up with an economy that is not producing high in terms of volume of products and quality of products. So corruption is destroying the country at the moment.”

He stressed the need to create and have a system that helps the country to measure its level in the area of building integrity, noting that the launch of the national integrity barometer would aid in that regard.

“We think that we need to have a system that helps us understand how well we are doing in building integrity. It is one thing to talk about corruption perceptions incessantly. We feel it is a very negative narrative and it does not promote the emerging good practices in the country”, he added.

However, he noted that there is a very slow but steady progress that has been made in the maritime sector where all the agencies have come together at the highest levels to form mechanism to evade corruption.

“So corruption has not disappeared but integrity is appearing and that is what we want to celebrate; that it is possible for integrity for integrity to begin to appear even before corruption has disappeared and we think that it is very encouraging of Nigerians that Nigeria should be inspired to know that change can even happen.

“If you are talking about corruption perception index, you are doing a survey of surveys, right now, anything published in 2019 is probably based on things that happened in 2016-2017, so if you are struggling to build integrity in the port sector for instance, it is unlikely to show up in your corruption perception index, may be for another two to ten years.

“But if you build an integrity index, which is looking at the corruption risks in the ports, it is looking at the mitigants to those risks; it is looking at the presence of a mechanism to invade the corruption and that mechanism is working and if that mechanism can work automatically without interventions of a third party, then you have gotten an integrity system going.

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