There is a quiet joke that circulates in almost every workplace, community, and country in the world. It goes something like this: rules are like spider webs — strong enough to trap the small and the weak, but the powerful simply walk through them. It is funny because it is true, and it is tiring because it keeps being true.Open the code of conduct of almost any institution — a company, a church, a political party, a government ministry, a university — and you will find language written in the register of universality: all employees, every member, no one is exempt.
And yet, in practice, enforcement rarely lives up to its own wording. The junior staff member who arrives ten minutes late is queried. The executive who arrives forty minutes late was “held up in a meeting.” The intern who misuses a resource is disciplined. The director who does the same has the matter “reviewed internally,” quietly, and without consequence. The pattern is so familiar it barely raises an eyebrow anymore — and that, perhaps, is the real scandal.
This column is not an attack on any one leader, party, or institution. It is an attempt to name a pattern that repeats itself across nearly every sector of public and private life, and to ask why it persists — and what, if anything, can break it.
In the workplace
Corporate ethics policies are often the first place people encounter this contradiction. Anti-harassment, conflict-of-interest, and expense policies are typically drafted by senior leadership and applied, in practice, most rigorously to the people furthest from that leadership.
A junior employee who pads an expense report faces disciplinary action; a senior executive who does the same is often quietly asked to “correct” it. Studies on workplace misconduct consistently find that seniority and tenure are among the strongest predictors of whether a complaint results in real consequences — not because senior staff are inherently more ethical, but because they sit closer to the people who decide what “consequence” means.
In politics and government
Nowhere is the gap between stated principle and lived practice more visible than in public office. Leaders campaign on transparency and then resist freedom-of-information requests once elected. They legislate austerity for citizens while their own allowances, expense accounts, and appointments remain remarkably well insulated from scrutiny. Anti-nepotism rules exist in many public services on paper, yet family members and political loyalists routinely appear in appointments that a stranger, applying through the normal channel, would never have secured.
The public rarely begrudges leadership itself — most people accept that governing requires trust and delegation. What corrodes public trust is the visible, repeated gap between the standard preached and the standard practiced.
In religious and community institutions
Faith communities and traditional structures are meant to be moral anchors, and for many people, they are. But even here, the same asymmetry shows up: congregants are counselled toward strict codes of personal conduct, while leadership misconduct — financial or otherwise — is frequently “handled internally,” shielded by deference to authority and fear of scandal. The very reverence that gives religious leadership its moral force can also become the mechanism that protects it from accountability.
In the justice system
Perhaps the starkest version of this pattern is legal. The principle that “no one is above the law” is foundational to almost every constitution on earth — and almost every citizen can, from memory, recall a case where wealth, status, or connections visibly altered an outcome.
Legal delays, plea arrangements, and sentencing disparities are not distributed randomly; they correlate, again and again, with proximity to power. The law’s text may be blind, but its administration rarely is.
Why this keeps happening
Rule-makers rarely see themselves as rule-subjects. Policies drafted at the top often feel, psychologically, like instruments for managing other people. The person who writes the anti-nepotism clause can recommend a relative for a role without much internal conflict, because in their mind, the clause was written with someone else’s family in view.Accountability requires someone with power to enforce it — and power tends to protect itself.
The people best positioned to challenge misconduct at the top are usually the most dependent on the person at the top for their livelihood. Enforcement flows downhill far more easily than it flows up.Loyalty gets rebranded as merit.
Favoritism is rarely announced as favoritism. It is dressed in the language of trust, experience, or “knowing how things work here” — which makes it almost impossible to challenge directly, because it is never named for what it is.Social distance breeds moral distance.
It is far easier to apply a rule strictly to a stranger than to a friend, a relative, or a political ally. Familiarity does not just breed contempt; it breeds exceptions.Scandal fatigue does the rest. When double standards are exposed often enough without consequence, the public gradually stops expecting anything different — and that resignation is, in itself, a form of victory for the status quo.
Why it matters beyond fairness
Selective enforcement is not simply unfair — it is expensive, in the truest sense. Trust, once eroded, is extraordinarily costly to rebuild. Every visible instance of a rule bending for the powerful teaches a lesson that spreads far beyond the individual case: proximity to power matters more than principle.
Over time, this doesn’t just demoralize the people held to a stricter standard — it actively trains the next generation of leaders that this is simply how leadership works, passing the pattern from one institution, one government, one generation to the next.
It also quietly kills initiative. Why report wrongdoing, follow procedure to the letter, or hold a difficult line, if the outcome seems to depend less on the rule itself than on who stands on the other side of it?
What can actually change it
Independent oversight, not internal review. Ethics committees, ombudspersons, and auditors who do not report to the person they may need to hold accountable are the actual mechanism by which “equal application” becomes real rather than rhetorical. Internal reviews investigating internal leadership are, structurally, a conflict of interest dressed as due process.
Published outcomes, not private resolutions. Institutions that publish anonymized records of how policy breaches were handled — regardless of the offender’s rank — make favoritism far harder to hide, because patterns become visible over time in a way single incidents never are.
Term limits and rotation for oversight roles. Long tenure in positions of unchecked authority is one of the strongest predictors of institutional capture. Rotating who holds oversight power reduces the time available for loyalty networks to calcify.
A free and protected press. Nearly every major exposure of elite misconduct in modern history — from corporate fraud to political scandal — has come not from internal systems working as designed, but from journalists, whistleblowers, and citizens willing to make the private public. Protecting that pipeline is not optional; it is structural insurance against impunity.
Leaders who apply the rule to themselves first. This cannot be legislated, but it can be modeled. A manager, minister, or elder who visibly submits to the same standard they impose sends a signal that quietly outlasts the moment it happens in.
A closing thought
None of this is a call for cynicism about leadership itself. Many leaders — in offices, congregations, courtrooms, and homes — do hold themselves to the standards they set, quietly, without needing applause for it. The frustration so many people feel is not a demand for perfection. It is a demand for consistency: the old, almost unfashionable idea that the same rule should mean the same thing, regardless of whose name is attached to it.
Until that becomes the norm rather than the exception, the joke about spider webs will keep making the rounds on every WhatsApp group, in every office corridor, and in every quiet conversation about power — because, sadly, it will keep being true.
Professor Love Obiani Arugu writes on ethics, leadership, and public accountability. Views expressed are personal.
