Hungary is more corrupt than sub-Saharan Burkina Faso, a country suffering from ethnic and religious warfare and atrocities that have displaced 2 million people, according to a new corruption index report from Transparency International, an organization lavishly funded by George Soros’ Open Society Foundations. In fact, according to the report, Hungary is as also tied with communist-led Cuba, massively corrupt South Africa, and beaten by Ghana, Benin and Saudi Arabia
The Corruption Perceptions Index, compiled by Transparency International’s Berlin headquarters, evaluates and ranks countries based on the level of corruption in the public sector. The corruption index is prepared by summarizing surveys examining corruption in individual states’ public authority system, economy and society, as well as the performance of countries in the field of the rule of law.
The last point regarding “rule of law” is especially important when comparing Hungary, as rule of law virtually does not exist in countries like Burkina Faso and in countries like Saudi Arabia, which is an authoritarian theocracy where no democratic elections have ever been held.
It is worth exploring the claims of TI further, with Burkina Faso serving as a good starting point. The country is ruled by a military junta that seized power in a coup. According to the BBC, just last year, “Burkina Faso’s military government has announced it will extend junta rule for another five years.” The U.S. State Department’s travel warning for Burkina Faso makes for dire reading: “Do not travel to Burkina Faso due to the volatile security situation and the high threat of kidnapping, terrorism and armed banditry (level 4 of 4).”
In Burkina Faso, citizens and businesspeople cannot move over any extended distance without being hit with police or armed forces checkpoints, which are common across much of Africa, where police and soldiers indiscriminately demand money.
Burkina Faso is a humanitarian disaster rife with extrajudicial killings, torture, and mass executions by security forces. Just last year, members of the country’s military were said to have taken part in “unbearable images of rare cruelty” as the country continues to wage war against Jihadists. According to a report from Barrons:
Burkina Faso’s army has condemned recent “macabre acts” and is working to identify those responsible, after videos showing the mutilation of corpses, allegedly by military personnel, were circulated on social media.
The images showed “unbearable images of rare cruelty” and allegedly show members of the Defence and Security Forces (FDS) and the Volunteers for the Defence of the Homeland (VDP) mutilating a human body, according to the General Staff of the military, who have ruled the Sahelian country since 2022.
Based on a BBC report just released yesterday, fighting continues to rage in the country. Three fighters from Ghana involved in battles in the country due to ethnic and religious ties spoke to the BBC, with one of them telling the reporter: “My elder brother, his wife and children were all killed by the [Burkinabe] army. It pains me a lot. The military came to their community in the forest. They killed all of them, a whole household, including 29 people.”
In Burkina Faso, the corruption goes beyond just the mere exchange of bribes involving money, which is required to do virtually anything in the country. In fact, it goes all the way to sex, which means that refugees have had to trade sex in order to receive humanitarian food packages, known as the “sex-for-food” scandal.
The report further notes that “aid agencies say that over the last decade some two-million people have been displaced by the insurgency in Burkina Faso and tens of thousands killed.” Additionally, rebel jihadists control up to 60 percent of the country at any given time, raising questions about how reliable any of the surveys are from Burkina Faso when huge swathes of the country are cut off from communication with the outside world.
Of course, it is also worth exploring the other countries on the TI corruption index, which also claims that Hungary is as corrupt as South Africa — a country where there are rolling blackouts due to mass corruption within public utilities, a country where politicians are routinely killed during election season in massive numbers, and a country that just passed a law allowing for the expropriation of property without compensation in an effort aimed at wiping out the country’s White farmers.
South Africa is a country where roving gangs are stealing so much of the copper from critical infrastructure that everything from construction and telecommunications to power generation simply no longer works in the country. Remix News reported on the country’s massive corruption in its energy industry last year.
Much more could be dedicated to the topic of South Africa, Burkina Faso, as well as Cuba, or even the countries allegedly even less corrupt than Hungary, such as Saudi Arabia, but even a person with limited knowledge about the world would sense something fishy about TI’s report. In their gut, they would know that this seems to be a highly partisan report separated from reality, but nonetheless, the global media is reporting on this corruption index in the manner for which it was designed — to attack Hungary. In some ways, it almost appears that the TI report, in its entirety, is designed for this purpose.
The Transparency International report bases its report on the “perception” of corruption from a survey of businesspeople and experts. Of course, if these business people and experts have a grudge against the ruling government in any country, they can say whatever they please about the government and their “perception” of corruption. It also matters who TI surveys and what kind of methodology they use, leaving a lot of room for interpretation and manipulation of the results.
The media and commentators should be making a mockery of TI for putting Hungary in the same category as these other countries and revealing its incredibly partisan nature, but due to the grip of the establishment media on the flow of information and its role serving as an “authority,” common sense cannot prevail.
The presentation involving the release of the TI corruption index report was held at George Soros’ Central European University (CEU) and delivered a report summarizing the most important findings related to the domestic corruption situation.
According to Hungarian newspaper Magyar Nemzet, Martin József Péter, Transparency International’s executive director, said at the event that the survey presented on Tuesday is based on 13 studies by 12 institutions, and Hungary was examined based on 10 sub-indexes. According to him, this is the most widely used corruption tool in the world. Highlighting their own importance and credibility, Martin József Péter said that Transparency’s Berlin headquarters requested an audit in 2018 from the Joint Research Center in Brussels, which deemed them suitable for measuring corruption.
The head of the organization presented at the press conference that the least corrupt states in the world include Denmark, Finland, Singapore, New Zealand, Luxembourg, Norway and Switzerland. Martin József Péter highlighted that these countries all have high per capita income, with only Singapore being the exception, as it cannot be considered a democracy.
Transparency International’s list of the most corrupt countries includes Venezuela, Somalia and South Sudan. It should also be noted that it found Hungary to be the most corrupt country in the European Union.
“Corruption has increased the most in Hungary at EU level,” said the head of Transparency Hungary, according to which our country has dropped 14 points, and the corruption situation has deteriorated sharply between 2012 and 2024.
According to the official European Union survey, the Eurobarometer ranking, Hungary is the seventh least corrupt country of the 27 EU member states.
