The ancient proverb of the three wise monkeys, ‘see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil,’ was originally a parable encouraging personal values and virtue. In the modern corporate boardroom, the proverb has evolved into a blueprint for complicity. When directors and senior executives deliberately ignore misconduct, refuse to hear warnings, and remain silent in the face of wrongdoing, they are not protecting themselves or their institutions. They are actively enabling corruption, destroying governance, and perpetuating cycles of harm. In my experience, I have witnessed widespread instances of wilful ignorance (comprising wilful blindness, wilful deafness, and wilful muteness) that have transformed passive inaction into active complicity. I have also witnessed the whistleblower who sees and hears, dares to speak up and challenge wrongdoing, rapidly become a pariah and have the tables turned so the would-be hero/heroine becomes the sinner/enemy of the corporation.
Wilful ignorance is a deliberate choice to avoid knowledge that would demand action. In corporate settings, this manifests not as negligence or oversight. It manifests as executives who sign off on suspicious transactions without asking questions, boards that schedule no time for compliance reports, and managers who instruct subordinates, ‘Don’t bring me bad news.’ The legal and psychological doctrine of conscious avoidance holds that deliberately ignoring red flags is equivalent to actual knowledge. In practice, boardrooms across the world have elevated this evasion to an art form, deliberately limiting their direct/explicit knowledge of unethical actions and thus giving rise to the possibility of plausible deniability.
Closer to home, the saga of NNPC refineries offers a clear example. Between 2010 and 2024, according to media reports, billions of dollars were allocated to ‘turnaround maintenance’ of the Port Harcourt, Kaduna, and Warri refineries. Despite the huge sums allegedly expended, the refineries remained largely non-operational. Reports from various quarters revealed systematic contract inflation, over-invoicing, and payments for work never performed. No proper maintenance had occurred since 2001. The question is not whether senior officials knew; the question is how they could not have known. The answer is wilful blindness, a collective decision to look away because seeing would perhaps require stopping a lucrative flow of public funds.
Defenders of corporate silence often argue that looking away is a rational self-protection mechanism. Speaking up risks retaliation, losing bonuses, or career termination. In toxic organisational cultures and high-poverty environments, silence is the safest path. However, this argument collapses once a director has reason to know that serious misconduct is occurring. At that point, continued inaction ceases to be defensive and becomes complicit, aiding and abetting. Silence in the boardroom is not neutrality; it is a vote for the status quo.
Wilful ignorance cannot coexist with good governance; it systematically dismantles it. Effective governance relies on psychological safety and four pillars: transparency, accountability, checks and balances, and a culture of dissent. Each of these is corroded when board members adopt the three monkeys’ posture.
Transparency vanishes when executives conceal risks and boards do not ask to see them. Accountability evaporates when no one can be queried on a decision because everyone looks away. Checks and balances become farcical. Thus, corporations have audit committees that never audit and risk committees that never meet. Most damagingly, a culture of dissent is crushed. Whistleblowers are fired or driven into hiding. Honest employees learn that raising concerns ends careers. Over time, the boardroom becomes a rubber stamp and a chamber of enforced silence, where the only safe words are ‘I saw nothing, I heard nothing, I said nothing.’
The NNPC case again illustrates this collapse. Whistleblowers who attempted to expose refinery fraud were publicly accused of blackmailing the company. An attempt by a former Group Managing Director to scrap the dysfunctional refineries and start fresh was ignored-presumably because the ‘maintenance’ cycle had become a patronage machine. Nobody was tried; nobody went to jail. No director resigned in protest. The governance system did not fail; it was just subverted by those who chose not to see.
The final and most destructive consequence of wilful ignorance is that it perpetuates wrongdoing across time. When misconduct goes unpunished, it becomes normalised, and deviance then escalates. A culture of looking away does not limit corruption; it recruits new cowed participants. Junior managers observe that silence is rewarded and speaking up is punished. They learn to produce the reports that no one reads, to attend the meetings where no one speaks, and to sign the documents that no one verifies. By refusing to hear the warnings, corporations perpetuate wrongdoing. The wrongdoing does not stop; it is simply ignored into continuity.
The three monkeys belong in parables, not in boardrooms. When leaders choose wilful blindness, muteness, and deafness, they cross a clear line from self-protection to complicity. They destroy the very foundations of governance: transparency, accountability, checks and balances, and the courage to dissent. True corporate leadership demands the opposite: see evil, hear evil, speak evil, and then act. Anything less is cowardice dressed as prudence, and it makes every silent director an accomplice to the very crimes they claim to have never witnessed.
Corporations cannot rely on individual conscience alone and need to set up enabling structures for accountability, e.g., mandatory reporting, risk assessments, whistleblower protection, and most importantly, legal consequences and criminal liability for unethical corporate activities and wilful ignorance.