The walls have eyes!

KABUL: Under a soldier’s watchful gaze, a group of artists paint a blast wall outside Kabul’s presidential palace with a huge pair of eyes in bright, almost psychedelic colours.
Alongside the eyes, a slogan reads: “Corruption cannot be hidden from God or from the people”. The project is not some guerilla graffiti campaign but comes with the blessing of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani — bringing colour to the sometimes drab Kabul streets while pushing an anti-corruption message in a country where graft is rife.
One of the artists, 35-year-old Maryam, said the eyes were those of “all the Afghans who have had enough of corruption”, gazing down on officials who might be tempted to take a backhander. As the Taliban’s insurgency has raged on, the grey cement blast walls have mushroomed in Kabul in recent years, usually to insulate the rich and powerful. That has prompted anger from Kabir Mokamel, one of the other artists who created the fresco.
“They’re supposed to protect us? No, I think they’re supposed to protect the people who are inside. And me, I am outside the wall,” he said.
The anti-corruption message, written in the two main Afghan languages of Dari and Pashto, resonates deeply in a country where the culture of graft is entrenched at every level of life and especially among public officials.
Fourteen years after the fall of the Taliban, Afghanistan remains stuck in the depths of Transparency International’s annual corruption perception rankings, lying 172nd out of 175 countries.
Feeding the longstanding culture of graft is the lack of proper checks on the hundreds of billions of dollars in foreign aid that have poured in since 2001 to stabilise and rebuild the country.