When decay becomes normal, integrity becomes a crime

We live in Kenya, where language itself has been corrupted to accommodate moral collapse. Alcohol is no longer an addiction; it is “stress relief.” Adultery is not betrayal; it is “networking.” Usury is dignified as banking, bribery softened into “something small,” and corruption reframed as street-smartness. Theft is excused as survival, incompetence defended as political loyalty, and public office reduced to a personal ATM with no PIN and no shame.

This is not merely semantic creativity. It is moral laundering. When a society renames its vices, it is not trying to be clever. It is trying to feel less guilty.

In Kenya, modesty is mocked as backwardness. Honesty is dismissed as naïveté. Integrity is treated as a luxury for people who “don’t understand how the system works.” The prevailing wisdom is brutal in its simplicity: To survive, you must bend; to succeed, you must steal; to belong, you must compromise. Those who refuse are not admired. They are pitied, ridiculed, or quietly locked out.

Lying is now called strategy. Looting is justified as “our turn to eat.” Nepotism is defended as helping one’s own. And when public resources vanish, the outrage is not that they were stolen, but that the thieves were careless enough to be noticed. We have moved from condemning wrongdoing to merely critiquing its execution.

This moral inversion has consequences. It reshapes what young people aspire to, what leaders model, and what citizens tolerate. When corruption becomes normal, the honest person becomes an anomaly. When decay becomes routine, decency looks suspicious. And when impunity is entrenched, accountability is treated as an act of hostility.

Those who obey the law are told they are foolish. Those who ask questions are labelled bitter. Those who insist on due process are accused of slowing development. And those who refuse to participate in corruption are warned, sometimes kindly, sometimes cruelly, that they will never make it. The message is clear: Ethics are optional, but loyalty to the rot is mandatory.

This is how societies decay. Not through dramatic collapse, but through quiet accommodation. Step by step, line by line, joke by joke, the unacceptable becomes normal. What once provoked outrage now provokes laughter. What once demanded resignations now demands spin. What once disqualified leaders now qualifies them as “experienced.”

And when someone dares to challenge this madness, when they demand accountability, ethics, or basic decency, they are not debated; they are attacked. They are branded clout chasers, enemies of development, or sellouts. Their motives are questioned, their past excavated, their tone policed. Because in a society that has normalised decay, anyone insisting on standards becomes the problem.

This is the cruel paradox of moral decline: The more broken the system becomes, the more it resents those who refuse to break with it. Integrity exposes corruption without saying a word. Decency is an indictment simply by existing. And so the system responds the only way it knows how, by isolating, ridiculing, or crushing those who will not conform.

Yet history is unambiguous on this point. No society has ever stolen its way to prosperity. No nation has ever lied its way to stability. No country has ever normalised corruption and emerged stronger for it. What we call “street-smart” today becomes institutionalised incompetence tomorrow. What we excuse as “survival” eventually devours the very society it claims to navigate.

Kenya’s tragedy is not a lack of laws. It is a collapse of moral consensus. We know what is right, but we have convinced ourselves that it is impractical. We know what is wrong, but we have trained ourselves to laugh it off. In doing so, we have surrendered the most powerful resource any society possesses: Shared standards. And without standards, there is no accountability. Without accountability, there is no trust. Without trust, there is no development, only extraction dressed up as progress.

The greatest lie we tell ourselves is that corruption is inevitable, that ethics are for idealists, and that decency is incompatible with success. This lie serves those who benefit from the disorder. It silences the honest, intimidates the principled, and rewards the shameless.