The National Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies in Kuru, Jos, warned on Thursday that the death penalty for corrupt public officers, as suggested in some quarters, would not curb corruption in Nigeria.
The institution said that instead, Nigeria should embrace behaviour-change approaches to reducing graft.
The Director-General of NIPSS, Prof. Ayo Omotayo, stated this in an interview with journalists during the validation of the curriculum on institutionalising behaviour-change approaches to reducing corruption in the public and private sectors in Nigeria in Abuja.
According to him, there were strong anti-corruption regulations and campaigns to reduce corruption in Nigeria, adding that the measures had worked to some extent.
He said, “Killing people for corruption practices is not something that we at NIPSS want to encourage. If we can reduce corruption to 50 per cent levels, our society will be okay. So, corruption in Nigeria has not gotten to a level where we will be executing people
“You see, if you continue to do certain things in a certain way and you continue to get the same result, then you have to review your approach.
“We have come to the conclusion that we have all the laws or the legislation to ensure that we do not have corruption in Nigeria. But all of these have not been effective enough.
“So, we felt that we needed to make a whole paradigm shift to behavioural change. We ask ourselves: Can we get people to change their attitude? Forget about the law; forget about the order; let us start by changing our attitudes to behavioural changes.”
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