By Oumar Farouk Sesay
Corruption in Sierra Leone is often discussed in terms of theft, bribery, patronage, weak enforcement, rent-seeking, and abuse of public office. These explanations remain necessary. They identify many of the visible forms corruption takes: stolen money, manipulated files, inflated contracts, selective prosecutions, political arrests, captured institutions, and the private use of public power.
But they do not fully capture the deeper moral and institutional mechanisms by which corruption survives, mutates, and becomes culture. Beneath the stolen resources and distorted procedures lies a more dangerous surrender: the displacement of responsibility onto authority.
This is the world created by the phrase “orders from above.”
The phrase itself carries a revealing tension. “Order” means both arrangement and command. It can describe the lawful organization of public life, but it can also denote an instruction imposed by authority. “Above” adds hierarchy, distance, and uncertainty. It suggests a higher source of power, but not always a named or accountable one. In that linguistic gap, the danger begins: what should be lawful order can become moral disorder; what should be accountable command can become anonymous pressure.
In Sierra Leone’s political and administrative life, “orders from above” is not merely an instruction. It signals that power has spoken and that questioning may be dangerous. Its force lies in its vagueness. “Above” may mean a lawful superior, a political patron, a party operative, a commander, a minister, or no one at all. The authority is invoked but not always named. The command is felt but not always written. The burden is real, but the source may remain hidden.
This is why the phrase is central to disavowed-agentic corruption. It allows corruption to move through institutions as if it were a duty. It allows the actor to say, “I did not choose; I obeyed.” It allows the institution to say, “We only followed procedure.” It allows the power source to remain above the scene of harm. The movement is therefore not only linguistic but also moral: from order as lawful arrangement to order as command to order as alibi to order as the burial ground of conscience.
This is the foundation of what may be called disavowed-agentic corruption.
Disavowed-agentic corruption is a form of institutional and moral corruption in which public actors perform, enable, or normalize unlawful and unethical conduct while shifting moral and legal responsibility onto real, implied, or fictitious authority. It occurs when an individual retains enough moral awareness to know, suspect, or feel that an act is wrong but suppresses, relocates, or disowns that awareness by invoking obedience, loyalty, procedure, fear, necessity, or “orders from above.”
Its central logic is simple: the hand acts, the office enables, the victim suffers, but the conscience points upward.
The addition of the word “disavowed” is essential. This theory is not merely about agency in the ordinary sense. It is not simply about an agent acting for a principal or a subordinate acting on behalf of a superior. It is about the inner moral division of the actor who participates in wrongdoing while trying to disown the burden of that participation. The corrupt actor is not always morally empty. Often, he is morally divided. He knows enough to feel the weight of the act, yet he seeks relief in authority. He quiets the accusing inner voice by saying, openly or silently, “I had no choice.”
This is the theory’s distinctive contribution: it brings the corrupt agent’s interiority into the study of corruption. It asks not only what the actor gains, what the institution permits, or what the law fails to punish, but also what happens within the person who acts corruptly while claiming obedience. What happens to conscience when authority becomes an alibi? What happens to responsibility when command is treated as moral cover? What happens to the agent’s soul when wrongdoing is repeatedly performed as duty?
Disavowed-agentic corruption is therefore not only institutional corruption. It is also a corruption of the moral self. It begins when the actor separates action from accountability, office from conscience, and obedience from responsibility. The person remains present in body, title, signature, uniform, robe, or office, but is absent in moral ownership.
This theory is not advanced as a replacement for established explanations of corruption, including principal-agent theory, collective-action theory, clientelism, neopatrimonialism, state capture, institutional weakness, rent-seeking, and patrimonial governance. Rather, it is proposed as a complementary framework that identifies a specific moral and institutional mechanism through which corrupt conduct is authorized, rationalized, diffused, and normalized: the displacement of moral and legal responsibility onto real, implied, or fictitious authority.
Principal-agent theory helps explain problems of delegation, monitoring, incentives, and information asymmetry. Collective-action theory helps explain why corruption persists when individuals believe others are corrupt and that honesty appears irrational. Clientelist and neopatrimonial theories help explain networks of loyalty, dependence, patronage, and political exchange. State capture explains how public institutions can be bent toward private or partisan interests.
Disavowed-agentic corruption does not deny these explanations. It asks a different but related question: how does the actor cross the moral threshold from knowing to doing, from discomfort to participation, and from conscience to compliance?
Its contribution lies in explaining how corrupt actors and institutions translate incentives into action while preserving an inner language of innocence. In this sense, “orders from above” should be understood not as a total explanation for corruption, but as a mediating mechanism through which other forms of corruption are enacted, shielded, and morally laundered.
The theory draws on Stanley Milgram’s concept of the agentic state, the condition in which a person ceases to see himself as an independent moral actor and instead views himself as the instrument of another person’s will. But disavowed-agentic corruption goes beyond obedience as a psychological condition, examining its institutional, cultural, and spiritual consequences. It is not concerned only with the fact that a person obeys. It concerns how obedience becomes an inner refuge from guilt.
In Sierra Leone’s public life, this agentic condition takes institutional form. The official who says, “I was instructed,” the officer who says, “the order came from above,” the clerk who says, “there is nothing I can do,” the judge who bows to pressure, the prosecutor who acts for political convenience, and the bureaucrat who buries a file all participate in a culture where responsibility is shifted upward and accountability dissolves into the fog of authority.
A Contemporary Illustration: The Bar Association Blockade
The events at the Bintumani International Conference Centre on 31 July 2026 offer an unusually direct illustration of this mechanism. The Sierra Leone Bar Association had scheduled its Annual General Meeting and elections for 31 July and 1 August. Lawyers arriving at the venue encountered police barricades and were barred from entering. Assistant Inspector General Sylvester Koroma, the Regional Commander for Freetown West, announced that the meeting would not proceed because of “circumstances beyond our control” and, in another reported formulation, for security reasons. Yet no specific threat was publicly identified, and no court order restraining the meeting was produced.
The Association’s directors described the intervention as unlawful and unconstitutional, arguing that the management of the Association’s affairs remained with its directors under Article 19 of its Articles of Association. The police position, as publicly reported, did not disclose who or what office directed the blockade, the legal instrument relied upon, or the facts alleged to justify it. This distinction matters. The absence of a publicly produced court order does not, by itself, prove that every police restriction is unlawful; police may possess statutory powers to respond to genuine security risks. But where a peaceful professional association is prevented from conducting its statutory business, legality requires more than uniforms, barricades, and an unnamed command. It requires identifiable authority, a lawful basis, reasons capable of scrutiny, and a proportionate response.
The episode therefore captures the anatomy of disavowed agentic power. The officers at the gate were visible; the author of the decisive command was not. The delegates bore the immediate burden; the source of authority remained beyond interrogation. “Circumstances beyond our control” performed the same moral and institutional work as “orders from above”: it cast a human decision as an impersonal inevitability. Responsibility traveled upward precisely where accountability became difficult to trace.
The incident also reveals why the theory must distinguish among actual, anticipated, and fictitious authority. The public record presently supports the existence of an operational police decision, but it does not establish who, if anyone outside the police command, issued it. Association officials publicly claimed that the Government sought to influence the Bar election, but those claims were not accompanied by evidence sufficient to treat them as established fact. The unanswered question is therefore not merely political; it is institutional. Was the blockade based on a lawful police assessment, an actual political instruction, an anticipated preference inferred by officers, or an authority invoked without a traceable source? An accountable system should not leave citizens to choose among these possibilities.
Its aftermath deepened the institutional injury. The Annual General Meeting was postponed indefinitely; the Association reported substantial financial losses; its Public Relations Officer, Alfred Kamanda, resigned and withdrew from his re-election bid; and the Board subsequently proposed an Extraordinary General Meeting to establish a caretaker body before its extended mandate expired. These consequences show that opaque command does more than stop a meeting. It can alter leadership succession, exhaust institutional resources, intimidate professional participation, and shift the internal balance of an independent body without any adjudicated finding.
For a Bar Association, the symbolism is especially stark. Lawyers are officers of the legal system, and the organized Bar is expected to defend legality, due process, and institutional independence. When lawyers themselves are denied access to their own meeting by officials relying on unexplained superior direction, the episode becomes a test of whether law governs power or merely receives notice after power has acted. It is the kneeling state in concentrated form: the law stands outside the gate while anonymous authority occupies the building.
The discourse of disavowed-agentic corruption extends beyond the explicit language of “orders from above.” It also appears in ordinary expressions that soften, circulate, and conceal responsibility: “it is in the pipeline,” “we are in it,” “something for the bosses,” and the joking formula “score from above, money from below.” These phrases do not merely describe corruption; they help shape its moral atmosphere. They convert individual choice into collective inevitability, private taking into institutional custom, and ethical discomfort into humor.
“It is in the pipeline” is especially revealing. The phrase sounds administrative and impersonal, yet precisely for that reason it can obscure agency. The pipeline becomes a dark process to which responsibility is surrendered: the file is moving, the arrangement is underway, and the decision has entered a system no single person seems to control. Yet a pipeline does not create itself. People place matters into it, keep them moving, redirect them, or allow them to disappear. By attributing action to process, the speaker transforms a human decision into an apparently autonomous mechanism.
“We are in it” performs a different kind of moral work. It spreads responsibility across a group until no one seems fully accountable. The phrase can signal complicity, mutual protection, or the expectation that everyone will benefit, and therefore everyone must remain silent. The plural pronoun creates a shelter: the actor is no longer a person making a corrupt choice but a member of a shared arrangement. Collective inclusion becomes collective disavowal.
The phrase “something for the bosses” exemplifies disavowed-agentic taking on behalf of those above. Money or favors are collected below, while legitimacy is borrowed from the hierarchy. The person demanding or receiving the benefit presents himself as a conduit rather than a beneficiary: the taking is supposedly not for me but for those above me. In practice, the phrase may conceal several possibilities at once—an actual demand from superiors, an anticipated tribute, or a fictitious claim used to justify private enrichment. The structure is the same: value flows upward, fear flows downward, and responsibility vanishes in between.
Even ridicule can serve this system. The retort, “You want to teach me woke?”—or similar accusations that a critic is self-righteous, fashionable, naïve, or morally intrusive—pushes disavowal outward onto those who object. It says, in effect: do not interfere; keep your righteousness and morality to yourself; this is my opportunity, my share, my turn. Instead of answering the ethical challenge, the speaker discredits the act of challenging. Moral language is recast as arrogance, and corruption is defended as realism, entitlement, survival, or private business. Disavowedness thus becomes contagious: not only does the actor deny responsibility, but others are pressured into denying their right to question it.
But disavowed-agentic corruption is not merely obedience to actual orders. It operates through three forms of authority: actual, anticipated, and fictitious.
The first is actual authority: a direct instruction from a superior, whether written, spoken, implied by office, or communicated through political channels. This is the most visible form. A minister pressures an agency. A commander instructs an officer. A senior official directs a file. A political figure interferes with the process. The subordinate obeys, not necessarily because the instruction is lawful, but because power has spoken.
The second is anticipated authority. Here, no direct order is required. Officials gauge the appetite for power and act in advance. They know which case should move, which file should be left alone, which person should be protected, which critic should be punished, which contractor should be favored, which student should be passed, and which investigation should be buried. This is corruption by atmosphere. It thrives when institutions begin to read the mood of power rather than the text of the law.
The third is fictitious authority, perhaps the most corrosive form. In this case, an official invents or exaggerates an order from above to pursue private gain, settle scores, extort money, seize property, block opportunity, delay justice, or deprive a citizen of rights. The citizen hears, “This came from above,” but cannot see who issued the order, whether it exists, or how to challenge it. A phantom authority stands between the victim and accountability. What appears to be state power may, in fact, be personal malice dressed in official clothing.
This is where corruption becomes especially dangerous. Once a society accepts invisible authority as a sufficient explanation, opportunists learn to live in the gap between the alleged command and the citizen who bears its burden. In that gap, files vanish, contracts inflate, rights shrink, bail evaporates, investigations collapse, and public resources become a private harvest. The order from above becomes the invisible signature on decisions no honest system would approve.
Disavowed-agentic corruption, therefore, expands the concept of corruption beyond money. Money may be stolen, but so may liberty, dignity, land, opportunity, truth, justice, and even the future itself. A person may be dispossessed not only by bribery but also by an unnamed order. A community may lose its land not only through fraud but also through administrative obedience. A river may be poisoned not only by greed but by a system in which every official below the level of power has learned to comply, remain silent, or benefit.
This is the calcification of corruption: the process by which isolated acts harden into an institutional culture. At first, an unlawful order is issued. Then someone obeys it. Then others learn to anticipate it. Then institutions adjust their procedures around it. Then citizens become resigned to it. Then laws are bent, amended, or selectively enforced to protect it. Eventually, corruption no longer hides from the law; it begins to wear the law like clothing.
This is one of the deepest dangers facing any republic. The law does not kneel only when it is violated. It also kneels when it is rewritten, reinterpreted, or selectively applied to satisfy temporary power. Constitutions may be altered, statutes may be bent, regulations may be enforced against enemies and ignored for allies, and institutions may be redesigned to serve authority rather than to restrain it. What cannot be obtained lawfully is made to appear lawful. What should be checked by the Constitution is smuggled into legality through procedure.
In such a society, corruption endures not only because people steal but because the culture shields the thief. It is sustained by deference, fear, patronage, political gratitude, silence, and survivalism. People learn not to ask who benefits. They learn not to question why a tender was manipulated, a prosecution was pursued, an appointment was made, a file was buried, an investigation died, or public money moved without public explanation. Culture becomes the underground constitution of corruption.
This explains why anti-corruption efforts often fail when they focus solely on prosecution, audits, or financial recovery. These measures matter, but they are not enough. A society cannot defeat corruption while rewarding obedience over integrity, proximity over principle, and silence over truth. Laws may condemn corruption, but culture may still protect it. Institutions may announce reform, yet officials may still wait for the signal from above.
The result is the kneeling state.
Part Two will examine the consequence of this culture: the kneeling state—where law, institutions, public character, and ultimately the national conscience surrender to power.