We have a measurement problem eloquently illustrated in a Yoruba tale about a Mecca has-been. The fellow in this tale had just returned from a pilgrimage to Mecca, apparently the first to do so in his community. Upon his return, folks were understandably curious and wanted to know about the Holy Land.

Thinking of what would best illustrate the majestic splendour of Mecca, the sojourner decided to use a native fowl as an example.

“You all know our native fowl?,” he began. 

“Of course!,” his curious, attentive listeners chorused.

“The fowl in Mecca is as big as a cow, if not bigger!,” he told them.

“Oh no!,” one rather incredulous listener said, amidst the rapturous gasps of h-e-n-e-n-h-e! “Big as a cow or big as a goat?”

“Ok,” the sojourner replied, “Let’s say it’s as big as a goat!”

“Oh no!,” the incredulous interlocutor reposed again. “Big as a goat or as big as a rabbit?”

This encounter continued until the sojourner, lowering his hand each time he was challenged, grudgingly lowered it until the point where nearly everyone finally concluded that the size of the fowl of Mecca was not significantly different from the size of the local one.

The tale of the fowl of Mecca is a metaphor of our census dilemma. We have spent nearly 60 years counting ourselves and yet, the answer to Nigeria’s census question is: it depends on whose hand is at play.

The Nigerian Population Commission (NPC) estimates that Nigeria is 218 million; the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) puts the figure at “over 200 million”; while the UNFPA and the World Bank estimate Nigeria’s population at between 216 million and 218 million, or thereabouts. 

Former President Goodluck Jonathan even said at a recent event that Nigeria is not 200m. “Far from it,” he reportedly said on April 14. “We should be about 150m.”

As things stand, Nigeria is in the company of Afghanistan, DR Congo, Uzbekistan, Madagascar, Eritrea and Lebanon as countries without a census population. The only thing certain about the Lebanese population, for example, is that there are more Lebanese in the Diaspora than at home!

The recent attempt to have another count in Nigeria, 

already overdue by 17 years, has been postponed indefinitely. After a hasty meeting on Friday night between President Muhammadu Buhari and the Chairman of NPC, Nasir Isa Kwarra, the Federal Government announced that it had decided to let the incoming administration handle the census. 

The postponement did not surprise me. After years of doing nothing, the Board of 36 commissioners and a relatively unknown chairman have become so used to pay and prestige without work that getting any serious census off the ground was always going to be a tough job. 

Ten years ago, former Managing Director of Nigerian Breweries Plc and Chairman of NPC, Festus Odimegwu, was forced to resign his position because he said Nigeria could not have a meaningful census except certain fundamental changes were made. 

He said at the time, “If the current laws are not amended, the planned 2016 census will not succeed.” By that, of course, he meant laws that make the population of states a basis for the sharing of oil revenues and political representation. 

His comment ruffled feathers. President Jonathan who already had his back to the wall sacked Odimegwu to appease deeply offended interests in the North who thought the NPC chairman could not be trusted to conduct a credible census.

It turned out, however, that Jonathan’s sacrifice was neither enough to secure him Northern sympathy in the 2015 election nor did the census hold as planned in 2016. His successor, Muhammadu Buhari, after promising to hold the census in May 2023 has now kicked the can down the road, with no shortage of excuses.

The most obvious one was the shift in the date of the governorship and state house of assembly elections. The NPC said the shift in state elections from March 11 to 18 complicated its original plans to have the census between March 29 and April 2. 

That is potentially true, but mainly false. The shift by one week may have momentarily affected NPC’s planning and execution, but only momentarily. The Commission was not ready, simple. Apart from those in its glass-panelled offices in Abuja and a few staff in the states, NPC has been very busy talking to itself.

It was not the shift in election dates by a week that complicated NPC’s problem. Its unseriousness was worsened by widespread complaints about the failure of the Independent National Electoral Commission’s (INEC) bimodal verification system. NPC was deeply worried by the prospects of a flawed count piling on the unresolved BVAS mess.

Another sign of unpreparedness was the questionnaire – the basic instrument for the 2023 census. On April 14, the NPC Director of Public Affairs, Dr. Isiaka Yahaya, was quoted to have said in Kano that the Commission would not ask questions about religion and ethnicity in the census!

Why not? What is it about respondents’ religion and ethnicity that NPC is so afraid of that it desperately wants to expunge from the questionnaire? 

If there was anything that needed a review, it is the often-weaponised “state of origin” which could have been replaced with “state of residence,” for example. But to pretend that it’s OK to strike out religion/non-religion and ethnicity and make us a bunch of aliens is, well, largely alien to population census. I don’t know where this idea is coming from or what NPC hopes to achieve. 

But none of the countries I have searched turned up this demographic insanity. Not India, the world’s largest multi-ethnic democracy, where everything from caste to mother-tongue and migration status is required; not South Africa or Kenya; and certainly not Ghana, Nigeria’s neighbour.

Yet, what these countries have in common, but which Nigeria lacks, is significant degree of reliability in primary data on births, deaths, school enrolments, migrations and so on, managed in secure systems and regularly updated. Without reliable primary data, any census conducted — whether every five, seven or ten years — is a waste of time. And without this data also, no reliable planning or forecast is likely.

It would seem that the real elephant in the room, though, is that the NPC knows the Bola Ahmed Tinubu government would reject the outcome of a census rammed down the country’s throat with only days before President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration leaves. 

They’re dealing with a familiar customer. It was Lagos State, under Tinubu, that dragged the Federal Government to the tribunal over the 2006 census, on grounds that the state’s population had been underreported by nearly half its size. 

The current Lagos Deputy Governor, Femi Hamzat, who was the Commissioner for Science and Technology at the time, produced a book on behalf of the state, entitled, “Errors, Miscalculations and Omissions: The Falsification of Lagos Census Figures,” which essentially said that instead of the 9.1 million which the NPC had awarded the state, its own shadow census showed the state actually had a population of 17.6 million.

Nothing much came out of the legal challenge, but Odimegwu’s complaint seven years later re-echoed the sentiments of Lagos and significantly explains the scramble, this time, to nick the census before May 29.

If Kwarra and his commissioners are deceiving themselves, Buhari knows that Tinubu’s government will not accept any census result under the current circumstances. That is why the census was postponed.

Yet, given the current structure of the country, especially the conservatively dominated National Assembly, it would be difficult to have a credible census, even under Tinubu, without a review of the law that makes population the basis of sharing oil money. 

Under the “horizontal sharing” formula of 26.72 percent of revenue in the federation account, for example, population accounts for 30 percent. This figure could be cut to 10 percent; while internal revenue which currently gets 10 percent could be increased to 30 percent.

Appeals not to politicise the census is empty, self-serving noise. Politicians will not relent, unless there is also a countervailing legislation that ties the extent and scope of Federal intervention in states to the taxes or royalties collected from the states and, fundamentally, to how much wealth the states themselves create.

Nothing short of a drastic action will cut the politics of our census fowl to its true size.

Isn't it amazing that the light of our President-elect is shining all over the planet today and his glory resonates throughout the world?

The latest in a series of some partisan editorials by some of this country’s newspapers seeking to rewrite recent history was published by the Punch newspaper paper this weekend, painting a bleak, pessimistic and frequently inaccurate picture of the state of our nation and outgoing President Muhammadu Buhari’s leadership.

In this post-election period of heightened tension and disinformation, we see it fit to set the record straight.

First let’s start with the one thing the editorial gets right: that President Buhari inherited an economy in disarray. Corruption ran rampant, oil-prices were nose-diving and – astoundingly – an international terror cell, the Boko Haram controlled territory the size of Belgium within our country’s borders.

That so-called country, the Caliphate is unrecognizable from today’s Nigeria.

Today, corruption is thrust out in the open by Buhari’s landmark whistleblowing policy, empowering Nigerians to report it without fear and seeing the repatriation of hundreds of millions of dollars stolen by corrupt politicians and stashed in banks abroad.

Terrorists no longer hold any territory in Nigeria whatsoever, and their leaders have been neutralised by our security forces.

Economy has witnessed growth. External reserves have maintained a healthy growth throughout these eight years.

Within two years of the Buhari administration, exports more than doubled from the 2015 records. Agriculture exports grew 180.7% by 2017 above the value in 2015.

Raw material exports grew 154.2% in the same period; solid minerals grew 565% and exports of manufactured goods 26.8%.

The Economic Recovery and Growth Plan (ERGP), the Federal Government’s medium-term Economic Plan, launched by President Buhari in April 2017, successfully ushered in a macroeconomic environment and helped the country to achieve food security.

The editorial begrudgingly credits President Buhari for the “massive success” of pushing through the Petroleum Industry Bill – a staggering achievement attempted but failed by myriad previous administrations – as well as the vast improvements to national infrastructure that have set our country on course for sustainable and equitable growth.

The reality of President Buhari and his legacy is a far cry indeed from what the editorial describes as a leader who “failed to demonstrate any real grasp of modern economic ideas, and lacked the presence of mind or leadership acumen required to turn the ailing economy around”. Goodness!

Which economic miracle worker in Punch newspaper can turn round an economy which suffers from collapse of oil prices, COVID-19 lockdown and associated supply chain crisis and the Russia-Ukraine war?

Look around the world and see how practically every country struggles from these disasters.

But President Buhari is not a North Korean dictator. He would be scornful of any world leader who claimed a perfect record and would be the last person to make such claims for himself.

He had his strengths and his weaknesses, and applied the former and mitigated against the latter to achieve his overarching goal: to leave Nigeria a better place than he found it. In that he succeeded.

He presided over the most turbulent period in modern Nigerian history, helping our nation navigate through global shocks such as volatile oil prices, the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the global cost of living crisis.

He kept the ship steady, and paved the way for his successor, President-elect Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, to take the reins at the end of this month and build upon what he has already achieved.

The editorial states that Buhari will not be missed. We shall see. But, countless Nigerians whose futures he has improved, will fondly remember him for good.

Among these, to take just one aspect or two- the two million poor and vulnerable Nigerian households that are currently benefiting from the Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) program, which pays a bimonthly stipend of N10,000 per household; the 355,000 vulnerable persons have received a special one-off grant of N20,000 each in the 36 states and the FCT; the beneficiaries of Nigeria’s Micro-Pension Scheme which allows self-employed persons and persons working in organisations with less than 3 employees to save for the provision of pension at retirement or incapacitation.

Punch possibly doesn’t have a record of the government’s Survival Fund, the National Youth Investment Fund, and National Special Public Works Program (774,000 beneficiaries across 774 LGAs nationwide), and the Central Bank’s COVID-19 N300 billion Targeted Credit Facility (TCF) to support millions of small businesses, households, and young people, with federal grants, loans, and stipends.

This Survival Fund has provided grants (Payroll Support, Artisan and Transport Sector grants, and General MSME grants) to more than 1.2 million beneficiaries, since the last quarter of 2020. It has also provided free business registration to 250,000 MSMEs across the country.

Nor will he be forgotten by the owners of the new 40 plus fertilizer companies and the thousands of people they employ, producing locally to service the more than 12 million new rice growers who in turn provide six million tons of paddy processed by more 100 new rice mills with Kano alone having 62, and others spreading far and wide to Ebonyi, Lagos, Ekiti, Adamawa, Bauchi, Gombe, Kaduna, Katsina and others.

No, Punch should stop living in denial. These ones and their kith and kin making up the 200 million plus citizens of our country, the teachers whose backlog of unpaid salaries were paid and the pensioners from years yore, denied payment and treated with contempt now smiling their way to the banks will remember positively that Muhammadu Buhari came, saw and he conquered.

Garba Shehu is the Senior Special Assistant to the President (Media & Publicity)

President Buhari has come to judgment. After exercising presidential power, judgment follows. Pricked by pangs of conscience on the last Sallah Day, Buhari realized that he committed many injustices against numerous Nigerians during his 8-year misrule. Consequently, he apologized to Nigerians and begged for their pardon. “God gave me an incredible opportunity to serve the country. We are all human, and if I have hurt some people along the line of my service to the country, I ask that they pardon me… All those whom I have hurt, I ask that they pardon me,” said a seemingly remorseful Buhari.

President Buhari has destroyed the lives of countless Nigerians during his 8-year misrule. Therefore, it is not surprising that he is now sitting in judgment with his conscience. A man reaps whatever he sows. The obligation to avoid inflicting physical or psychological harm on others is a primary ethical teaching of Prophet Mohammed (blessings and peace of Allah be upon him). “He who causes harm will be harmed by Allah, and he who acts in a hostile manner will be treated in a hostile manner by Allah” (Jami’al-Tirmidhi, No. 1306). Unfortunately, the Buhari administration has caused tremendous harm to many Nigerians. As we speak, many Nigerians, young and old, are leaving the country in search of the so-called greener pastures abroad. And if the mass exodus of Nigerian medical doctors from Nigeria to Europe and America is not arrested now, there will be fewer or no medical doctors available in Nigeria by 2030. Writhing under the pains of suffocating Buhari’s policies, many multinationals shut down their operations in Nigeria, while others simply fired their staff. From 2016-2018, for example, 9.3 million Nigerians lost their jobs. From 2015-2018, poverty in Nigeria tremendously increased. Nigeria has now taken over from India as the poverty capital of the world. According to the African Development Bank (ADB) Nigeria Economic Outlook, about 152 million Nigerians live on less than $2 a day, representing approximately 80% of the country’s estimated population of 190 million.

The United States Department of State has issued a damning assessment of Buhari’s government. In the 48-page Human Rights Violation Report, it stated that impunity remained widespread at all levels of government in Nigeria during Buhari’s reign. It notes that the Buhari government lacks transparency. The report also indicted the Buhari government for not adequately investigating or holding police or military personnel accountable for many extrajudicial killings. The Buhari government came to power on the mantra of fighting corruption. But tragically, the Buhari government is now defined by corruption. For example, the United States Human Rights Report has scored President Buhari’s government low for corruption. The Report states, among other things, “Although the law provides criminal penalties for conviction of official corruption, the government did not implement the law effectively, and officials frequently engaged in corrupt practices with impunity. Massive, widespread, and pervasive corruption affected all levels of government and the security services.”

Buhari’s currency redesign policy is still inflicting pain on Nigerians. Imagine having money in your bank account and not being able to access it because of a badly-conceived currency redesign policy. Imagine bank customers endlessly queuing up under the sun to access their own money in the bank. I gather that many hospitalized sick Nigerians have died simply because their relatives were unable to withdraw money from the banks to purchase drugs for the deceased. Is this not a sin that cries to heaven for vengeance?

At the twilight of the 2023 Election, Buhari promised Nigeria and the international community that he would leave a legacy of a free and fair 2023 election in his 8-year tenure. Now, it is no longer news that INEC organized the most rigged election in the history of elections in Nigeria. Why has President Buhari not queried or sacked the INEC chair Prof Mahmood Yakubu for organizing the most scandalous election in Nigeria?

The foregoing attests that President Buhari has failed in office. Buhari’s suffocating policies have led to the deaths of many Nigerians. This is why the man is laboring in vain to pacify his conscience, which has adjudged him a failure. A guilty person might escape human justice wrought in the court of law; they might take flight from their guilt through ingenious rationalization, but they cannot escape from the ultimate justice in the recesses of their conscience. The natural law is written in the heart of every rational person. Therefore, every rational person, whether they are Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, atheist, Marxist, internet free-thinker, juju worshipper, agnostic, animist, or otherwise, is under the judgment of the natural law written in their heart. For example, in one of the tragedies of Sophocles, the woman Antigone sought permission from the King to give her dead brother a burial befitting a human being. But the King refused because the dead brother was adjudged an enemy of the State. However, Antigone approached the King and told him that there was another law (natural law) higher than the King’s law, which obliged the King to give her brother a proper burial. Antigone was neither a Christian nor a Muslim. She had never read the Bible or the Koran, yet she recognized a higher law, the law of conscience, which obliged the King to give her brother a befitting burial. When we commit an injustice, our consciences continue to torture us until we make amends.

There is this anecdote of some Japanese ladies who had committed several abortions in their youthful days. Pricked by their consciences, they went and molded some effigies that actually looked like the babies they had murdered, placed them one by one on a platform, and started bowing before these effigies, asking them for forgiveness for the murders they had committed. This is natural law at work. In Dostoevsky’s epic work, Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov tried to erase his crime from his heart by ingenious rationalization, but upon discovering the inescapable basis for ultimate justice in his heart, he went to Siberia and served an eight-year prison term to appease his conscience.

Therefore, if Buhari really wants to appease his conscience and have a restful and peaceful retirement in Daura or Niger Republic, he should make amends or reparations for the many injustices he committed against Nigerians. Allah will treat him the way he treats others. Allah will not have mercy on him unless he has mercy on others. Therefore, President Buhari should treat people well in the remaining days of his tenure. He should show mercy to others to enjoy mercy and peace in Daura. He should show kindness. Allah loves those who are kind. Therefore, President Buhari should order the release of all prisoners unjustly detained in Nigerian correctional centers, including Nnamdi Kanu, who, in actual fact, has been discharged and acquitted by the court but is deliberately left to languish in prison. Buhari should also ensure that his government obeys all pending court orders served on it.

Ninety percent of President Buhari’s key political appointees are from his part of the country, and he refused to alter this imbalance in conformity with the pluralistic and multi-ethnic nature of Nigerian society and the Federal Character principle as enshrined in section 14(3) of the 1999 Constitution. Now, as he is quitting office, how would Allah judge him for this act of injustice? The Golden Rule states, “Honesty is the best policy.” Allah, the Exalted and Glorious, says, “stand firm for justice…even if it be against yourselves, your parents, and your relatives.” Therefore, Buhari should stand firm for justice and correct the lopsided political appointments in his government before he leaves office to avoid his conscience torturing him when he retires to Daura. He should also order for the arrest and prosecution of INEC chair Prof Mahmoud Yakubu for squandering a gargantuan sum of N3O5 Billion in organizing the most chaotic and rigged election in Nigeria. There is no doubt that Prof. Yakubu is a big disgrace to Nigeria. Therefore, justice demands that Buhari should fire Prof. Yakubu before he (Buhari) leaves office.

Ethical conduct is the anchor of the Islamic personality of a Muslim. There is an obligation on Muslims to improve and enhance the welfare of others, including care for the sick. But President Buhari cares no hoot about the welfare of the sick. Rather than improve and re-equip the existing public hospitals in Nigeria so that many sick Nigerians could go there for medical treatment, Buhari prefers going for medical tourism in London to cater for his own health. Therefore, in his remaining days in office, Buhari should show mercy to sick Nigerians. He should visit the hospitals and console the sick patients there. If President Buhari wants peace in his retirement, he should ensure that the daughter of Zion and conscience of Nigeria, Leah Sharibu, regains her freedom. Otherwise, the bad prayer of this girl will never allow Buhari to enjoy peace in his retirement. President Buhari has not only over-borrowed money but also misused the borrowed money in inanities. In fact, Nigeria’s rising debt profile spells doom for the incoming government.

Therefore, if Buhari wants peace in his retirement, he should team up with the incoming government to rein in Nigeria’s debt. Buhari is very conscious of his place in history. He is afraid that history will judge him harshly and negatively. But he should not forget that he has repeatedly promised to end insecurity in Nigeria. Even in March 2023, the President reiterated his government’s commitment to winning the war against terrorism and other forms of insecurity. The truth of the matter however is that insecurity in Nigeria has worsened despite Buhari’s assurances that he will defeat insecurity before leaving office. As Buhari leaves office without fulfilling his aforesaid promise, it is doubtful whether he will enjoy peace in his retirement.

Nigerian universities come up in the news these days to announce either the inauguration of new dress codes or the revival of dormant rules. Fixating on appearance is not new in Nigeria, but the frequency—especially by academic institutions—in the past months is head-scratching. Hardly a month passes these days without some university or polytechnic issuing a sartorial decree.

One can trace this mania to several factors. First, we are a culture that insistently regulates every sphere of life, and we cannot but extend that attitude to other people’s virtues. The orientation stems from our political history when our consciousness was militarised to the point that we are now a country of few producers but many regulators. You can detect the dictatorial bent in the language of the university bulletins where they announce they are “banning” certain sartorial items “with immediate effect.” Second, the rise of faith-based universities, similarly preoccupied with squeezing out virtue from students by any means necessary, puts some pressure on public universities to join in and play a lead role in this unfolding morality play.

Third is the painful fact that our tertiary institutions are just not busy enough. Industrialisation potentials in Nigeria have whittled due to serial poor leadership, and universities do not have research and development goals set for them. When an academic institution thus cannot produce knowledge for society, its energies get recalibrated towards administration and not much else. Chasing after students over their appearance or, in some cases, inaugurating a task force to do so gives these schools a sense of motion and mission. Since they cannot impact their immediate world meaningfully through their research and maybe even teaching, they turn to the Hisbah. The result of their preoccupation is that hardly a month goes by without one or more of these schools, in the bid to outdo each other in this ostentatious expression of their moral bona fides, announce which adornment they would be banning.

Time and space will not allow me to catalogue all the examples, but I will share enough to demonstrate the ridiculous extent these schools have gone to prove their virtues. Niger Delta University Vice Chancellor, Samuel Edoumiekumo, announced that students would wear uniforms. For a sum ranging between N20,000 and N30,000, the school would, of course, supply the uniforms. Students protested the directive and the university backed down. The compromise was to “ban” indecent dressing and enforce dress codes. Rivers State University similarly “banned” students from “wearing miniskirts, ankle chains (anklets or ankle bracelets), false eyelashes, tattoos, and any item of clothing that might be considered indecent.” The Vice-chancellor of Godfrey Okoye University, Christian Anieke, similarly “banned” indecent dressing for staff and students. Anieke lamented that most students and staff wear t-shirts with “unauthorised” inscriptions and “ordered” male students to comb or shave their hair properly.

Lagos State University did not stop at proclaiming a ban on “indecent” clothing such as miniskirts, face caps, rolled sleeves, etc., the Vice Chancellor, Professor Ibiyemi Olatunji-Bello, also asked lecturers to deny students that flout the rules access to lecture halls. So, as a LASU lecturer, you are not only to teach and research, but your range of skills must also include leering at female students wearing clothes “revealing sensitive parts of the body” to chase them out of class. Before teaching students, you must take some time to spot the ones with “lousy, unkempt, extremely bogus hair or coloured artificial hair, brightly tinted hair/eyelashes/brown, fixing of long eyelashes, nails and artificial dreadlock” to deny classroom access. If a male student wears jewellery, plaits his hair, they cannot possibly learn and must be chased out of class too. The LASU circular also noted a ban on “tattered,” “tight fighting clothes,” and “unkempt hair.” That makes you wonder if those who write these rules give a thought to their classism. What if some students wear tattered/tight clothes or unkempt hair simply because they are poor?

The University of Ilorin has a Dress Code Committee and Ahmadu Bello University’s dress codes even extend to the university staff and visitors. The Polytechnic Ibadan  did not stop at hounding “indecent” dressers, certain acts such as hugging a fellow student, wearing nose rings (or an additional earring) and wearing face caps “unconventionally” (?) are all major sins that will attract a semester suspension. I could keep going on relating the absurd obsession with regulating appearance by giving examples from schools such as Kwara State University; the University of Maiduguri; Federal Polytechnic, Anambra; University of Calabar; Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University; University of Ibadan; Abia State University, and many others, but you already get the point by now.

This hyperfocus on the dress by Nigerian public universities trying too hard to reform moral decline is not limited to the administrative cadre. On Google scholar, there are several articles written by academics in these schools to support one “ban” or the other on appearance. These allegedly academic articles first pontificate about the “moral crisis” engendered in society through the loss of cultural values and now being heightened by dressing. Some of these pieces even round off their poorly conceived thoughts with clichés such as “the way you are dressed is the way you are addressed.” Addressing people merely based on their dress is an error of judgment. It means those who lack virtue but can afford to dress well deserve more reverence than their less privileged counterparts who might be truly virtuous. If what people wear determines their morality, does that mean that the pre-modern societies where people did not wear clothes lacked virtue? If clothes are truly a mark of one’s morality, does that mean that the virtues of the Nigerian political class—almost always resplendently dressed in massive agbadas—is given?

The thing is, when a society is going through a phase where there is such anxiety about values and emphasis on regulating conduct (especially of its younger generation) such as this, at least two things are likely to be ongoing: first is that the crisis of morality that people are sensing and reacting to by instituting codes of conduct must be real. Those people might not be able to put their finger on it, but their intuition is correct that something is very rotten in the state. You only need to look at our society to agree that their sense of moral crisis is accurate. So, yes, people are justifiably disgusted by the putrefying odour wafting through their nostrils and sincerely anxious to trace its source.

Second, it is also likely that those who try their hardest to find out where things are wrong embody that rottenness. Traditionally, institutions like universities are a moral force within society because they are spaces where ideas of its value systems are formed and reformed. Through the power of thought, the university informs and impresses a culture of conscience to advance society’s understanding of itself. Their responsibility of moral preparation goes in tandem with similar institutions such as the family, religious and social organisations, and even the media. Wherever the values these institutions jointly uphold are strong, the society gains commensurate ethical strength. When they are weak, the rot is palpable.

Students’ dressing “indecently” to school is therefore not the evidence of moral decline as those making and enforcing dress codes imagine. No, the rottenness is symbolised in a university that no longer represents a space of intellectual and moral learning. Rather than reckon with the ethical decline within society and the overall institutional degradation that stymies serious ideological responses to these issues, university administrators respond in the most superficial ways by banning the least of all culprits – dress.