In Sri Lanka, it often feels like the queue is just a suggestion, a ceremonial line we form only until someone with the right connections, the right envelope, or the right surname walks straight past it. Ours is a society where process is optional but influence is everything. You don’t need to know the system; you just need to know someone.

Everywhere you turn, from the hospital ward to the wedding hall, from the Customs terminal to the classroom, there is a hidden economy thriving alongside the official one, and sometimes within it. It’s a network of favours, fees, and familiar faces. 

Corruption in Sri Lanka is no longer only about the big, headline-making scandals, the multimillion-dollar deals, the ghost highways, or the ports leased for a century. It is about the quiet erosion of public trust, one under-the-table payment at a time. It’s about the family that sells its land to pay for a surgery it should have received for free. It’s about the school admission that never happens unless there’s a ‘gift’ attached. It’s about the licence that gathers dust unless a bribe oils the bureaucracy.

A few days ago, another such case came to light, this time from the corridors of one of the country’s most respected hospitals. But it could just as easily have been any institution. Because corruption is no longer something we fight, it is something we accommodate. Sometimes with a sigh, sometimes with a payment, but most dangerously, with silence.

Sri Lanka pays a steep price for its culture of impunity. Beyond the moral decay, the economic toll is staggering. The World Bank has consistently estimated that countries plagued by high corruption lose up to 17% of their GDP annually to inefficiencies and leakage. 

Corruption distorts public spending. Roads are built where they shouldn’t be. Medical supplies vanish into thin air. Contracts go to the well-connected, not the most capable. Innovation is stifled. Merit is ignored. And every year, more of our brightest minds leave.

Internationally, the reputational damage is just as severe. Every time Sri Lanka makes headlines for the wrong reasons, whether it’s a doctored tender or a doctored prescription, investors flinch, lenders grow cautious, and tourism dips. Diaspora communities think twice before wiring their money home. Reputation, once lost, is expensive to regain, and in the global marketplace, credibility is currency.

The solution begins with accountability, not only through arrest and remand but through genuine institutional reform as well. Bodies like the Commission to Investigate Allegations of Bribery or Corruption (CIABOC) must be strengthened. Their independence must be guarded and their investigations protected from political interference. Above all, their actions must be made visible, so that the public begins to believe again.

We must stop romanticising shortcuts and excusing ‘small bribes’ as harmless. We must recognise that when we normalise corruption at one level, we enable it at every level.

There is a line in Oscar Wilde’s play ‘Lady Windermere’s Fan’ that feels hauntingly apt: “A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” That, increasingly, is what corruption makes of us – people who can buy anything, but can trust no one. A country where you can pay to skip the line, but never truly move forward.