What Politicians Can’t Corrupt Does Not Exist

[John Onyeukwu]

What Politicians Can’t Corrupt Does Not Exist

By John Onyeukwu , Lawyer, Governance and Social Impact Practitioner

This is how power quietly converts law into exception. Laws rarely collapse. They are negotiated, quietly, by those who can afford exceptions.

In January 1932, at the height of the United States’ Prohibition era, a curious document was issued in New York. Authored by Dr. Otto C. Pickhardt, a physician practicing on East 80th Street, the note certified that the convalescence of the Rt. Hon. Winston S. Churchill, then a prominent British statesman visiting the United States, “necessitates the use of alcoholic spirits especially at meal times,” adding that the quantity required was “naturally indefinite.” This medical certification reportedly enabled Churchill to consume alcohol legally despite the nationwide ban imposed by the Volstead Act.

Whether read as indulgence, pragmatism, or privilege, the episode is instructive far beyond its anecdotal charm. Prohibition was a sweeping moral and legal project, rigorously enforced against ordinary citizens. Yet it proved remarkably permeable when confronted with elite status, professional authority, and institutional discretion. The law did not collapse; it was selectively relaxed.

The deeper lesson lies in the mechanism, not the personality. No statute was repealed. No public exemption was debated. Instead, legality was re-engineered through an exception framed as medical necessity and legitimised by expert authority. Corruption in governance is not limited to illegality; it also includes the systematic distortion of equal treatment under law. This is how corruption most often operates in mature systems, not through crude lawbreaking, but through refined justifications that preserve the appearance of compliance.

Crucially, this was not the act of a politician alone. A physician provided the authorisation; institutions accepted it; social norms rendered it unremarkable. Power, in this sense, is collaborative. It recruits professionals and procedures, turning discretion into entitlement and exception into routine. The issue here is not Churchill’s character, but the structural ease with which power converts rules into options.

This is why the assertion that what politicians can’t corrupt does not exist should be understood not as cynicism, but as diagnosis. Governance systems are most vulnerable not where laws are absent, but where discretion is abundant, opaque, and unequally distributed. Corruption thrives in the space between formal rules and informal privilege.

Modern governance failures, whether in procurement, taxation, regulation, or public health, often follow this same pattern: not the absence of rules, but their quiet negotiation by the powerful. The enduring safeguard, therefore, is not simply better laws, but disciplined discretion, institutional restraint, and a citizenry alert to the quiet paperwork through which public principles are most often compromised.

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John Onyeukwu
http://www.policy.hu/onyeukwu/

 http://about.me/onyeukwu
“Let us move forward to fight poverty, to establish equity, and assure peace for the next generation.”
-- James D. Wolfensohn
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