Malawi corruption on the rise – Transparency International

Malawi is among the most corrupt countries in the world, a report released by an anti-graft  global watchdog shows.

The country has been ranked 110th among 175 countries in terms of the Corruption Perceptions in 2014 Global Corruption Barometer released by Transparency International (TI) on December 3 2014.

The Berlin-based group’s table is the most widely used gauge of corruption by governments, police, court systems, political parties and bureaucracies, highlighting a scourge it says undermines development and deepens poverty.

Transparency says that because corruption is illegal and secretive, it cannot be empirically measured. So instead it collates surveys from the World Bank, African Development Bank, Economist Intelligence Unit and other bodies.

It then ranks 175 countries on a scale of 0-100, where zero means very corrupt and 100 signifies very clean. This year the average score was 43, and two thirds of countries were below 50.

Malawi – currently rocked with the biggest corruption scandal in the country’s history with K20 billion was looted from public coffers by top government officials in a period of 6 months in 2013 and about K92 billion from 2005 dubbed cashgate – has fallen down on the ladder by 5 places on the index to record a score of 33 in the 2014 Corruption Perceptions index, from a score of 37 in 2013

TI ranked Sudan, North Korea and Somalia as the worst offenders and Denmark, New Zealand and Finland as the most squeaky clean.