By Oumar Farouk Sesay
Between the phrase “orders from above” and the familiar refrain “I was only following orders” lies a troubling passage in public life: the quiet transfer of moral responsibility from the person who acts to the unseen authority said to have issued the order. In that passage, conscience blurs, accountability recedes, and the duty to choose right from wrong is too easily surrendered to rank, title, and command.
The psychologist Stanley Milgram gave this surrender a name: the agentic state. In his studies of obedience to authority, Milgram argues that people can enter a mental state in which they stop seeing themselves as independent moral agents and instead see themselves as instruments of another person’s will. They do not necessarily lose their conscience; rather, they relocate responsibility. The burden of the act is shifted upward, toward the authority figure, while the person carrying out the command tells himself he is merely performing a role.
That theory helps illuminate the danger of “orders from above.” The phrase does not merely describe a command structure. It describes a psychological escape route. It allows the person who acts to say, in effect, that their hands moved, but the decision was not theirs. It allows the person who commands to remain distant from the consequences. Between the order and its execution, responsibility is diluted until guilt becomes difficult to pinpoint and justice even harder to demand.
In Sierra Leone, this phrase has too often served as more than an explanation. It has become a language of evasion, shielding those who issue unlawful orders, those who carry them out, and the institutions that later struggle to account for the harm done in their name. Responsibility is dispersed, accountability weakens, and a nation is left to confront wounds inflicted under the banners of discipline, loyalty, security, and state power.
The tragedy is not simply that orders are given. Every state depends on a chain of command. Armies, police forces, ministries, prisons, and courts cannot function without hierarchy. Authority itself is not the enemy. The danger begins when hierarchy is treated as sacred, when an instruction from a superior is allowed to outrank the Constitution, conscience, due process, and the dignity of citizens.
That is when the law begins to kneel.
It kneels when the person who issues the command hides behind office, title, or distance. It kneels when the person who carries out the command hides behind obedience. It kneels when institutions become theaters of denial, where many may have participated but no one accepts responsibility. And when the law kneels before power, the republic itself is diminished.
This is how injustice enters both the street and the courtroom.
On the streets, citizens exercising their rights can be treated as enemies of the state. Demonstrations, instead of being managed with restraint and lawful professionalism, can turn into scenes of panic, punishment, and bloodshed. When security officers believe that a superior’s order absolves them of responsibility, the trigger becomes easier to pull, the baton easier to raise, and the body of a compatriot easier to leave on the ground.
In the courtroom, the same sickness can manifest in quieter yet no less devastating forms. Files move or disappear. Charges are pursued or abandoned for political convenience. Bail is granted to some and denied to others without a convincing legal principle. Justice, which should be blind to status and party, begins to squint toward power. Judges, lawyers, clerks, prosecutors, prison officers, and police personnel may not all wield weapons. Still, each can become part of the machinery through which unlawful orders acquire the appearance of legality.
The gallows at Pademba Road Prison remain a grim symbol of what happens when state power becomes detached from moral restraint. Whether through wrongful convictions, political vengeance, coerced procedures, or institutional failure to protect the innocent, the lesson is the same: when obedience supplants justice, the state can turn its own citizens into offerings on the altar of authority.
Milgram’s theory is useful here not because public officers are laboratory subjects, nor because every act of obedience can be reduced to psychology. It is useful because it reveals a moral mechanism: people can commit or enable harm while seeing themselves as loyal, disciplined, or professionally obedient. The danger is not always the absence of conscience. Sometimes it is the trained suspension of conscience in the presence of authority.
But a serious argument must accommodate complexity without sacrificing its moral clarity. The problem is not hierarchy itself, nor is every public officer who cites orders acting in bad faith. Many civil servants, police officers, soldiers, prison staff, and court employees work under significant pressure. Some fear dismissal, demotion, transfer, humiliation, or retaliation. Others operate within systems that treat refusal as betrayal. The deeper failure, then, is not only individual weakness but also an institutional culture that rewards obedience over moral integrity.
Still, pressure is not absolution.
A uniform does not erase conscience. A title does not suspend the Constitution. A superior’s voice does not justify an unlawful act. The first duty of every public officer is not to the person holding office but to the law, the republic, and the people in whose name authority is exercised.
This is the moral limit that Milgram’s work forces us to confront. The agentic state may explain how people surrender responsibility, but it does not excuse that surrender. Understanding obedience is not the same as forgiving unlawful obedience. Explanation is not absolution. A person may feel like an instrument, but the law and conscience still recognize a human being capable of judgment.
The phrase “orders from above” is especially dangerous because it is often deliberately vague. Who is “above”? A minister? A commander? A party official? A president? A wealthy patron? A ghostly authority no one can name? Vagueness serves impunity. It turns accountability into smoke. The public hears that an order came from somewhere, but the source remains hidden, the paper trail disappears, and the victim is left to carry the burden of proof.
Nations decay not only through coups, wars, and dramatic betrayals, but also through daily acts of cowardice disguised as procedure. A police officer obeys an unlawful order. A prosecutor pursues a case without conscience. A judge yields to pressure. A prison officer enforces cruelty as routine. A civil servant signs a document that should never have been drafted. Each person says, “It was not my decision.” Together, they build a state where no one is responsible for anything.
No country can thrive under such a moral arrangement.
The rule of law requires more than beautiful constitutional language. It requires men and women within institutions who understand that legality is not whatever a superior demands. It requires written orders, transparent command structures, independent investigations, consequences for unlawful directives, and protection for officers who refuse to violate the law. It also requires a civic culture that honors principled disobedience when obedience would produce injustice.
Sierra Leone knows the cost of surrendering the rule of law to arbitrary power. Our history has taught us what happens when the Constitution is replaced by commands, when public service becomes personal service to strongmen, and when men and women of the law become thugs in wigs and uniforms, serving thin gods on borrowed thrones.
The task before us is not merely to condemn those who issue unlawful orders. It is to dismantle the culture that enables such orders to take effect. Citizens must demand accountability not only from the visible hand that commits abuse but also from the hidden voice that authorizes it. Institutions must stop rewarding blind loyalty and begin protecting lawful courage. Public officers must remember that history rarely absolves those who choose comfort over conscience.
A nation does not become just merely because it has laws. It becomes just when its people refuse to let power stand above the law.
That is why the law must not kneel.
It must not kneel to a uniform, a title, a party, a commander, a minister, a president, or any unnamed authority hiding behind the phrase “orders from above.” For when the law kneels, citizenship is diminished, conscience is outsourced, and justice becomes a favour granted by power rather than a right guaranteed by the republic.
The duty of our generation is to refuse that surrender. We must insist that no order is higher than the Constitution, no office greater than the republic, and no command more sacred than the dignity of the human being.