Between prostitution and public corruption!, by Stephaniee Shaakaa

Why the politician is the vice and the prostitute the service We are a society of selective outrage. We reserve our loudest moral condemnation for the woman on the street corner, yet we offer little more than a resigned shrug to the politician who loots the public treasury. We have been taught to describe the so called “world’s oldest profession” as a vice, while the suit and tie criminal who empties the nation’s coffers is treated as an inevitable feature of power.

It is time to correct that imbalance. If we are honest about human behaviour and social reality, we are forced to confront an uncomfortable truth. Prostitution operates within the logic of demand and supply that governs many human exchanges, while public corruption operates as extraction from the collective good. One is a private exchange between consenting adults. The other is a public act whose consequences are carried by millions who never consented to it.

That distinction is not semantic. It is moral. Consider something simple. A restaurant. A person who is hungry and cannot prepare food at home goes to a restaurant. They choose what they want, pay for it, consume it, and leave. No one is coerced. No one is deceived about the nature of the exchange. It is structured, transactional, and transparent.

Societies do not collapse because restaurants exist. They function because a basic human need finds an organised outlet. Human intimacy and sexual desire, whether people are comfortable admitting it or not, exist within the same broader sphere of biological reality. Across history, societies have had to find ways to manage, regulate, or contain that demand in different forms. To deny that is not morality. It is avoidance of reality. A useful way to separate moral categories is to ask a simple question. Where is the victim. In a consensual exchange between adults, however one chooses to interpret it morally, the transaction is limited to the participants involved. It is private in consequence, even when it is publicly debated.

Corruption is different. When public funds are stolen or mismanaged, the effects are distributed across an entire population. Hospitals lose capacity. Roads collapse. Schools deteriorate. Salaries are delayed. Lives are shortened by systems that no longer function as they should. The cost is collective, even when the decision is individual.

One exchange is contained. The other is systemic. To treat both as morally equivalent is to confuse private conduct with public harm.

There is also a broader social reality that cannot be ignored. Human societies have never succeeded in erasing basic drives through prohibition alone. They either regulate them, ignore them, or push them into informal spaces where oversight becomes weaker and risk becomes harder to manage. What is consistent across history is not elimination of demand, but the way societies choose to structure or ignore it. Some argue that when consensual and regulated outlets exist for sexual behaviour, pressure is more visible and easier to manage within defined boundaries. Others disagree with that interpretation. What is not disputed is that prohibition alone does not remove demand. It only shifts how and where it appears, and whether it is visible enough to be addressed or hidden enough to become unaccountable.

The real issue is not the existence of controversial exchanges. It is the consistency of moral attention. It is easier to shame the vulnerable than to confront the powerful. Easier to regulate private behaviour than to investigate public theft. Easier to moralise survival than to challenge systems of extraction that operate at scale.

That is why attention so often flows in the wrong direction. This is not an endorsement of any industry. It is a demand for intellectual honesty in how we assign blame and measure harm.

Because moral seriousness requires proportion. A struggling individual navigating limited options is not the same category of threat as a system that quietly drains an entire nation.

One reflects personal survival under constraint. The other defines collective suffering under authority. We do not need selective morality. We need consistent reasoning.

We do not need louder condemnation of private behaviour. We need clearer accountability for public power. One may offend personal values.

The other determines national survival. And any society that cannot clearly distinguish between the two will continue to punish visibility while protecting damage. That is the real hypocrisy.

And until it is corrected, outrage will remain exactly where it is least useful.

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