South Africa has plummeted 11 places in a global corruption survey that has seen Denmark, Sweden and New Zealand ranked as the least corrupt countries in the world and Somalia as the most.
Last year, South Africa was ranked 43rd in the world with a rating of 5.1 out of a potential 10 points on Transparency International's (TI) 2008 Corruption Perceptions Index.
This year the country slipped to 54th position with a 4.9 rating.
Stopping bent practices such as cronyism and embezzlement can save lives in poor countries, Transparency International said on Tuesday as Somalia, Iraq and Myanmar again came bottom in its global corruption rankings.
Zimbabwe is also very far down the list, ranked at 166 with a rating of only 1.8. The Democratic Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Chad and Sudan are the other African countries rated below Zimbabwe on a list that numbers 180 overall positions.
"In the poorest countries, corruption levels can mean the difference between life and death, when money for hospitals or clean water is in play," TI said. "The continuing high levels of corruption and poverty plaguing many of the world's societies amount to an ongoing humanitarian disaster and cannot be tolerated," the organisation's head, Huguette Labelle, said.
Rampant corruption in low-income countries also jeopardises the global fight against poverty and threatens to derail the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), according to the report.
This "calls for a more focused and co-ordinated approach by the global donor community to ensure development assistance is designed to strengthen institutions of governance and oversight in recipient countries, and that aid flows themselves are fortified against abuse and graft", TI said.
It estimates that unchecked levels of corruption would add $50-billion, or nearly half of annual global aid outlays, to the cost of achieving the MDGs on water and sanitation.
Somalia, the east African nation without a functioning government since 1991, scored just 1.0 point on TI's range of between zero, which is highly corrupt, and 10, which is very clean.
The score is based on perceptions of the degree of corruption as seen by business people and country analysts. The places where officials were seen as least likely to line their own pockets were Denmark, Sweden and New Zealand, sharing first place with a score of 9.3 points, ahead of Singapore in fourth and Finland and Switzerland in joint fifth.
In 2007 Denmark, Finland and New Zealand shared the top spot.
But TI was also critical of some wealthy nations that registered significant drops in the global rankings, such as Britain, whose score fell to 7.7 points from 8.4 in 2007.
Britain fell to 16th in the rankings from 12th in 2007.
The continuing emergence of foreign bribery scandals indicates a broader failure by the world's wealthiest countries to live up to the promise of mutual accountability in the fight against corruption, TI said.
"This sort of double standard is unacceptable and disregards international legal standards," said Labelle. "Beyond its corrosive effects on the rule of law ... (it) undermines the credibility of the wealthiest nations in calling for greater action to fight corruption by low-income countries." - Sapa-AFP
0 comments:
Post a Comment