Vote for Corruption: Fortier for Puppet Rule
A Vote for Clarity, A Vote for Confusion
Colonel Muammar Marius Rogér al-Fortier
Reykjavík-sur-Ubangi—I stand again before the citizens of this Republic to ask for their vote.
My promise is simple. I intend to expand the sphere of corruption.
Under my last term this Republic passed from the custody of one nation to the protectorate of another by a method of my design, and the method worked. It worked so well that no diplomat on this continent can presently say who owns us, and several have stopped trying. This is not a failure of governance. This is a strategic failure of governance.
Permit me to describe the improvements I intend.
Iceland will remain our guardian, in the spiritual sense. Reykjavík will continue to be a role model for Africa, on the understanding that it now does so without its signature appearing on any document, without liability of any kind, and without formal acknowledgment that the relationship exists. This protects Iceland. It also protects us. A guardian whose name is written nowhere cannot be subpoenaed, and cannot be made to answer for a ward it was never on record as holding. We have grown very fond of arrangements that exist everywhere except in writing.
The weekend rotation is abolished. It was inefficient, it was legible, and legibility is a vulnerability I no longer intend to carry. In its place, the Wheel of Fortunate Nations will spin every Friday. The system of wedges continues unchanged. A corrupt official purchases a wedge on behalf of a nation, the funds are received directly by yours truly, and on Sunday we become the protectorate of whichever nation the Wheel selects.
I will not pretend the proceeds go to a public thrust. This is my own private construct. And to this I add the shell companies.
Ownership of the Central Afro-Icelandic Protectorate will henceforth be distributed across a lattice of private holding entities, each incorporated in a different jurisdiction, each owning a portion of the next, none owning the whole. A diplomat wishing to determine who governs us will find that the question has no floor. He will follow the ownership from one entity to another until he arrives, exhausted, back at the entity he started with. We have tested this. It is impregnable. Two foreign ministries have already abandoned the attempt, and a third has, we understand, reassigned the analyst.
I present this our people not as a scandal but as a shield. A nation whose ownership cannot be established cannot be held accountable, cannot be sanctioned as a proxy, and more importantly, our government officials cannot be renditioned and made to answer before any council for the conduct of a patron it cannot be proven to have. Confusion, correctly administered, is the only defense a small nation has ever been permitted to keep against the overreach of international courts and tribunals.
Our message to the world remains one of friendship: If we like you and your money, we will accept you as you are.
The people of Africa understand what this world is, they understand what I am protecting them from. This is a world in which formal agreements are broken casually, in which defensive pacts are honored precisely until they are inconvenient, and in which the bodies that claim to enforce these things enforce them selectively, against the weak. In such a world, the honest instruments are worthless, because honesty assumes an enforcer, and there is none.
Corruption, by contrast, is reliable. Corruption is the one arrangement in this world that always pays. A bribe, once accepted, creates an obligation more binding than any treaty, because the official who paid it has as much to lose as the official who took it. I did not invent this. I merely declined to be embarrassed by it.
And I will remind the citizens of my record, since modesty would only mislead them. Even before my first term as President, I have accepted, as a humble Minister of Foreign Affairs, not only bribes with a discipline that our neighbors and my colleagues have never managed, I accepted the mere promise of a bribe, IOU's of corruption, and even shook empty hands simply because they looked wet and felt slimy. I took on behalf of the nation what was offered when I cared to, and I declined what did not suit us, and made no man believe he had bought more than he had.
There were offers this office did not accept. I will not name them, but I will only say that a government which accepts every bribe indiscriminately is not corrupt. It is merely for sale, which is a different and lesser thing. Discernment is what separates the two, and discernment is what I bring.
Some will ask how a man can campaign on corruption and still call himself honest. I answer that the honesty is precisely the point. A corrupt man who conceals it is a danger. A corrupt man who publishes his rates is a public servant. I enrich myself, yes, and I do so openly, because I have so much to give, and a man cannot give from an empty hand. Every wedge purchased strengthens this office.
That is the platform. Custody by lottery, ownership by labyrinth, guardianship by nations who were never here. I ask for your vote not because the system is clean, but because it is mine, and because I am the only man corrupt enough to run it honestly.
The next Wheel spins Friday. Any donation towards my campaign also counts towards the Wheel.
By the hand of Colonel Muammar Marius Rogér al-Fortier,
President of the Central Afro-Icelandic Republic, former Protectorate of Japan
For more on the Wheel of Fortunate Nations, read:
https://app.warera.io/article/6a5e2cabdcf0f06ddaebc63c
https://app.warera.io/article/6a637f86f972e7c8eba76d50