By Oumar Farouk Sesay
In developing my theory of disavowed agentic corruption, I have argued that one of the most effective mechanisms by which institutional wrongdoing operates is the familiar phrase: “orders from above.”
But the theory goes beyond actual orders.
Sometimes the order from above is real. Someone with authority gives an instruction, an agent executes it, and responsibility can theoretically be traced upwards. More troubling, however, are two other possibilities: the fictitious order and the anticipated order.
A fictitious order occurs when an official invokes unnamed authority above him to justify an action that may, in fact, have originated with him. “Orders from above” then becomes both sword and shield: the agent exercises power while disowning authorship of that authority.
The anticipated order is more insidious. Here, no one needs to issue an instruction. The agent reads the political climate. He understands the preferences, anxieties, and ambitions of those above him; he knows what will please them and what will not. He therefore acts preemptively, translating the presumed wishes of those in power into official action.
Against this backdrop, the Speaker of Parliament’s declaration that “I won’t sit here and see the President’s power reduced” is especially revealing. It is the language of anticipatory obedience: the Speaker does not cite a presidential instruction but assumes responsibility for protecting what he takes to be the President’s interests. Yet this posture sits uneasily alongside the President’s own admonition during the state opening of Parliament that members of Parliament should vote in line with their concerns on the 2025 amendment bill. The contrast is striking. Publicly, the President appears to authorize parliamentary independence; institutionally, the Speaker positions himself as a guardian of presidential power. If both statements are taken at face value, the tension suggests that influence need not travel through explicit commands. It may instead operate through anticipation, with subordinates internalizing what they believe power wants and acting on those presumed wishes before any order is given.
Power, in such circumstances, does not need to speak.
Its agents have learned its language so thoroughly that they can hear instructions in its silence, as if through telepathic communication.
It is through this lens that I have been thinking about Sierra Leone’s current constitutional amendment crisis.
The controversy is often framed as a dispute over constitutional interpretation and parliamentary arithmetic. But beneath those questions lies another, perhaps more unsettling one: how does power move through institutions when no one can—or will—identify the person who gave the order?
Section 108 of the 1991 Constitution specifically governs the alteration of the Constitution. It prescribes heightened requirements precisely because changing the supreme law is not ordinary parliamentary business. The controversy surrounding the parliamentary vote, particularly the Speaker’s reliance on a provision other than the specific alteration clause in Section 108 in determining the applicable threshold, therefore raises questions extending far beyond arithmetic.
It raises questions about agency, authority and responsibility.
If alteration of the Constitution is specifically governed by Section 108, what explains resort to another provision or interpretative route in determining the threshold required for its passage?
More importantly for my argument: where did that interpretation originate?
Was the Speaker acting upon an explicit instruction?
Was he exercising an independent legal judgment? Does that independent legal judgment raise the question of will or skill?
Or was something subtler at work—the phenomenon I describe as anticipatory obedience, in which an institutional actor reads the prevailing political atmosphere, divines the desired outcome of those who wield greater power, and acts accordingly without ever needing to receive an order?
These distinctions matter.
If there was an instruction, responsibility travels upwards.
If there was no instruction and the Speaker acted entirely on his own interpretation, responsibility rests squarely with the office that issued the ruling.
But there is a third possibility, and it may be the most dangerous for a constitutional democracy: a political environment in which those who wield power no longer need to issue questionable orders because institutional actors have become sufficiently attuned to power to anticipate what power desires.
That is how the architecture of accountability begins to disappear.
The superior can say, I gave no such order
The subordinate can say, I merely exercised my constitutional authority.
And between those two denials sits the accomplished act—strangely parentless, although its political consequences are visible to everyone.
This is the essence of disavowed agency.
It allows power to enjoy the fruits of an action while formally remaining detached from its authorship. It creates plausible deniability above and apparent autonomy below. Responsibility becomes so fragmented that when the nation eventually asks, “Who did this?” every actor can point elsewhere.
This is why the present constitutional amendment crisis should not be reduced to competing interpretations of parliamentary arithmetic. The deeper question concerns the institutional psychology developing within the state.
Are our institutions obeying the Constitution, or are they learning to anticipate power?
That question extends beyond the Speaker and beyond Parliament. Once anticipatory obedience becomes embedded in a political system, it can spread from institution to institution. Civil servants anticipate ministers. Ministers anticipate the presidency. Regulatory bodies anticipate political expectations. Institutions designed to exercise independent judgment gradually internalize the preferences of those who wield power.
Eventually, no telephone call is necessary.
No written instruction is required.
No incriminating memorandum exists.
The atmosphere does the work.
And therein lies the peculiar danger of anticipatory obedience. Traditional abuses of power leave fingerprints. Someone signs the order. Someone issues the directive. Someone can be summoned to explain. But when institutions learn to anticipate power, the chain of command becomes almost invisible. Authority exercises influence without necessarily asserting itself openly.
The constitutional danger is therefore greater than the fate of a single amendment.
A constitutional democracy is endangered long before anyone openly announces an intention to subvert it. The danger begins when officials stop asking, What does the law require of me? and start asking, consciously or not, what those above me want me to do.
At that point, an “order from above” becomes unnecessary.
The atmosphere itself has become the order.
That is why the constitutional amendment crisis poses not merely a legal test for Sierra Leone but an institutional one. The controversy may ultimately move beyond Parliament to the Supreme Court, where the constitutional question can be removed from parliamentary maneuvering and tested against the text, structure, and meaning of the supreme law.
If and when it does, the Court will confront something larger than a disagreement over numbers. It will be called upon to determine where constitutional authority ends and political expediency begins.
And therein lies perhaps the final hope.
The judiciary exists precisely for moments when the political atmosphere threatens to overwhelm the Constitution. The Supreme Court is not called upon to read the mood of State House, Parliament, the governing party, the opposition, or the street. It is called upon to read the Constitution. Its compass must therefore be neither political weather nor institutional convenience, but the law.
If this dispute reaches the highest court, the deeper test will not concern this amendment alone. It will test whether those entrusted with the final interpretation of the Constitution can resist the very phenomenon at the heart of this essay: the temptation to hear an instruction where none has been spoken, to convert the atmosphere surrounding power into a command.
That is where the distinction becomes decisive. The Court may allow the political climate outside the courtroom to acquire weight within it, or it may insist on a more austere constitutional proposition: that atmosphere, however charged, has no standing before the law.
Institutions endure not because their occupants are untouched by political winds, but because they possess the discipline to prevent those winds from moving the scales of justice. Constitutional independence does not require judges to be deaf to politics. It requires them to know when politics must cease to matter.
Parliament may have produced the controversy.
Politics may have created the atmosphere.
Power may generate expectations without ever giving an order.
But at the doors of the Supreme Court, that chain of anticipation must end.
There, no silence should be mistaken for instruction, no political preference elevated into constitutional principle, and no atmospheric pressure permitted to bend the law.
When the moment comes, the Court should take its orders from one place only:
the Constitution. LONTA!