Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU) has long been celebrated for its staunch commitment to freedom of expression.
Over the years, Great Ife students have vigilantly upheld this principle through steadfast resistance against any encroachments on their freedom of expression. With the growing and recurring stabs to the historical prestige of this great citadel of learning on social matters and pro – humanity stances, the story is about to change.
Starting from the harassment of female students by security officials to the harassment of students (male and female) by bus drivers, to the “testing the waters” kind of directive of dressing timetable issued by the management before resumption that was laughed at (which would, at the point of release, have met very strong resistance if implemented) to the highest and funniest and gravest directive by OAU’s newest Hisbah police (OAU ICT Center) of aggressively preventing female students from writing their exams if they faulted their directives.
It’s exam period and students’ academic composure for their exams at the ICT center gets disrupted based on what one person thinks about their dressing! This dress code was a prerequisite to only OAU female students before they wrote the CSC exam yesterday in OAU.
Recently, the OAU ICT Center has been enforcing a dress code policy disproportionately targeting female students.
This policy prohibits attire such as short sleeves, short knickers, dyed hair, tight dresses, and other forms deemed ‘inappropriate’ by the some few people. Notably, male students have not faced equivalent scrutiny, and this has shown a gender-biased application of this smuggled-in-through-the-back-door dress code.
Instead of targeting women about their dressing, how about we point fingers at how they are aversively being treated with sexual objectification and societal medieval rules that subjugate their freedom of thought and expression?!
This directive will only foundationally input it in the mind of female students that the woman is an object to be screened with more scrutiny than the man.
Such gender-specific regulations perpetuate patriarchal structures within academic institutions that are supposed to move society past crude patriarchy. These policies infringe upon personal freedoms and reinforce social norms that objectify and control women’s bodies.
These hierarchical differences will limit women academically and socially and also heap burdens on the man by increasing the social dependency of the woman on the man because the woman has been structurally denied social progress. The gradual damning effect of Patriarchy is that it will evolve from dress codes into oppressive imposition and infringements of people’s sexuality, and then at last the oppression and exploitation of their lives.
The imposition of such dress codes is a continual sign of colonial legacies that sought to control and ‘civilize’ African bodies according to Eurocentric standards, and dictated acceptable appearances.
What concerns dress choices and exams? Does dress choices affect intellect?
Yesterday, I saw many guys entering the halls of exams while the ladies were being sent back to waste money and change their dresses to meet the constitutional demands of OAU’s hisbah police department for that day. Their crime was that they’re ladies and should be punished for their naturally attractive anatomy. This should not be interpreted as a cry to meet such irrational demands on men too to achieve equality.
Equality is not equality in oppression.
It is equality in freedom – equality in freedom of expression.
On that note, it must be made clear that the ICT center does not have the right to police students dressings (male and female) on exam days and anywhere and anytime whatsoever.
While the analogy to ‘Hisbah’ shows the authoritarian nature of the ICT Center’s actions, it is important to note that OAU is supposed to be a secular institution that should never sanction such dress policing like it is being illegitimately done by Hisbah in the Northern Nigeria where religious laws applies.
Recently, the police in Anambra state threatened on loudspeaker, as they moved across streets, to jail women who do not wear pants and bras under their clothes based on a directive by Prof. Soludo, the Governor of Anambra State.
OAU as a secular and prestigious university that has a ‘CENTRE FOR GENDER STUDIES’ should be at the forefront of leading a national condemnation of such directives by a governor of a secular state on the basis of the principles of liberal education, but even OAU is guilty of the same sin!
Feminists, activists, journalists, humanists, humanitarians, every human rights and human needs activist, human dignity advocates and every lover of freedom, concerned students and well meaning citizens of this country should react with the highest anger to caution these growing issues of classissm, sexism and acute, aggressive and public display of sexual discrimination on OAU campus before it is too late.
Written by Comrade Kelechi
Faculty of Social Sciences
Obafemi Awolowo University
Ile-Ife
Nigeria.
