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.