Dear Editor,
We are living through a grand theatrical performance, and the ticket price is our collective future. While the average citizen grapples with deteriorating services and rising costs, a select caste of “Oversight Heads” reclines in a state of terminal lethargy, presiding over commissions that have become expensive monuments to inaction. The taxpayer foots the bill for this performance, yet too often responds with a shrug of indifference—the very oxygen these commissions breathe. It is time to exhale. It is time to look the architects of this rot in the face and demand an accounting of the “value for money” they have incinerated.
For too long, the roll call of failure has been long and unbroken. The Head of the Police Service Commission enjoys “fat cat” perks while the office operates in near-complete opacity. Misconduct is documented, yet meaningful investigation is a void. Instead of serving as a protector of integrity, this office has become the lid on a pressure cooker of public grievance—its silence not a strategy, but a betrayal.
At the Integrity Commission, the guardian’s post has been abandoned. That body, flagged for “Presidential Capture Risk,” watches the country’s corruption perception decline without a flicker of urgency. One must ask: is its leadership an independent sentinel of public trust or a decorative shield for the executive branch? Every day that passes without a single enforcement record published is a day that confesses irrelevance.
The Public Procurement Commission fares no better. Under its “variable performance,” conflict-of-interest concerns multiply while billions in contracts pass unexamined. Such paralysis is not abstract—it is a direct tax on the public purse, a levy extracted in the form of poorly built roads, broken schools, and hospitals left unfinished. Meanwhile, the Ombudsman’s office—once imagined as the humble man’s recourse—has become a ghost in the machine. To cite being “advisory-only” as an alibi is cowardice. When advocacy becomes invisible, justice itself retreats into the shadows of the status quo.
Yet this decay, this paralysis, did not arrive uninvited. The rot festered in our silence. We—the citizens—must confess: our tolerance has nourished this mediocrity. We allowed these commissions to become retirement homes for the politically loyal because we lacked the will to demand better.
We treated oversight as a luxury rather than a mandatory service our taxes already fund. By applauding “infrastructure building” over measurable results, we have taught these institutions that survival need not require performance. We financed their SUVs and air-conditioned offices while accepting the mediocrity of a governance model that views the people as an ATM, not as master.
It is time to draw the line. The state of permanent paralysis ends the moment the taxpayer refuses to serve as accomplice. We must stop being the silent financiers of our own disenfranchisement. The path forward is simple but uncompromising: those who lead oversight bodies must either publish or resign. If they cannot produce data-driven, transparent reports within thirty days, their privileged salaries should be forfeited. The era of advisory charades must end. We do not need symbolic institutions that whisper advice—we need bodies that refer cases for prosecution, that sting where corruption nests.
“Power bows to public pressure”. The “Fat Cats” only sleep because the public has been too quiet to wake them. Let this quietude end now. Let us stop shrugging, stop accepting, stop paying for our own betrayal. The line is drawn here—no more window dressing, no more paralysis. Either we rebuild oversight, or we abandon forever the pretense that it exists.
Oversight—or out. We refuse to be complacent any longer
Regards
Hemdutt Kumar
