“Criminality has colonised positions of authority, converting offices of governance into theatres for the celebration of lawlessness. Those who should occupy the austere solitude of correctional centres instead strut the corridors of power, their presence a grotesque parody of stewardship.”
How did we arrive at this theatre of the absurd? Coups d’état, once harbingers of national alarm, have now been relegated to the background noise of our daily discourse. Families, perhaps, nourished by the spoils of such upheavals, display neither remorse nor reflection. Instead the narrative is swiftly repainted in the garish colours of tribalism, as if morality itself were negotiable by ethnicity.
In the 1990s, tales of kidnapping travelled from distant Arab sands to our ears as exotic horrors. Today, the menace has migrated to the very street corners we traverse; ransom payments are executed with the same casual indifference as purchasing a loaf of bread.
It has become almost a civic ceremony; to be extolled even by the state’s own investigative apparatus, as one who has misappropriated billions is to achieve a dubious social currency, for the political elite and society at large have flung open the gates to such malfeasance.
Criminality has colonised positions of authority, converting offices of governance into theatres for the celebration of lawlessness. Those who should occupy the austere solitude of correctional centres instead strut the corridors of power, their presence a grotesque parody of stewardship.
We are spectators of a carnival where lawbreakers are elevated, where vice masquerades as virtue and where the very mechanisms of accountability are blunted by complicity.
How did we come to this?
Perhaps it is the slow inexorable erosion of civic conscience; the corrosion of institutional integrity and the societal complicity that applauds the audacious thief as a modern day aristocrat of influence. In this inverted world, honour is perverse and the spectacle continues unchallenged and unrepentant.
•Aduwo, Permanent Representative of CCDI to the ECOSOC/United Nations, is a member of the World Bank Independent Integrity Group.
