Kenyan and Nigerian presidents ranked among world’s most corrupt leaders of 2024

Kenyan president William Ruto has received the most votes and has thus become — together with Nigerian president Bola Ahmed Tinubu — one of the top five 2024 finalists for the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) ‘Person of the Year’ award.
Ruto received an unprecedented number of 40,000 nominations for ‘Person of the Year’ in organized crime and corruption due to popular anger over the passage of a contentious a finance bill, youth unemployment, and government corruption in the east African country. Young Kenyans held demonstrations for weeks this past June and July last year, demanding that Ruto step down. Security forces responded with tear gas, water cannons, arrests, and bullets — many people were killed, injured, or went missing following the protests. Nigeria’s president Bola Ahmed Tinubu ranked third, following Indonesia’s former president Joko Widodo, in light of repeated allegations of his involvement in drug trafficking, forgery, and financial malpractice.
The ousted Syrian president Bashar al-Assad was chosen as the overall winner, as the former dictator has been accused of leading his country’s production and distribution of the highly addictive street drug Captagon, earning billions of dollars to operate prisons and maintain his brutal authoritarian rule. For the first time in the contest’s 13-year history, the judges have awarded a special “Lifetime Non-Achievement Award” that goes to Equatorial Guinea president Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, one of the longest serving dictators in the world. Instead of developing his natural resources endowed country into a model for Africa, Theodoro Obiang has squandered its natural resources, living an obscenely lavish lifestyle while the rest of the population suffers in poverty. The OCCRP highlights both Assad and Obiang as examples of longtime dictatorial regimes, in which corruption plays a critical role.