The box of handouts was covered in dust.
Zuri placed it on a table in the volunteer training room and wiped the lid with her sleeve.
“These were used last semester.”
Four volunteers joined them voluntarily. Wema told them at the start that they were not being interviewed as suspects. The goal was to reconstruct the instructions they had received.
They sorted pages by date and source.
Version A: welfare referral. Version B: fraud awareness. Version C: lifestyle-observation guidance.
Version C appeared three weeks after the Student Council approval.
“Peer signal is here,” Wema said.
Zuri placed the official council minutes beside it. The motion authorized students to *refer concerns to welfare professionals*. It did not authorize screenshot collection, lifestyle surveillance, or unverified suspicion reports.
One volunteer, Sheila, raised her hand as if still in training.
“I sent a screenshot once.”
Wema did not ask whose.
“Why?”
“The trainer said if we saw a major contradiction, we could flag it. There was a form.”
The sample form included an optional evidence-attachment field.
Zuri stared at it. “This was not in the mandate.”
“We thought council approved it,” another volunteer said.
“And council thought your role was referral,” Zuri answered.
Sheila produced a training notebook. One line read: *Lifestyle contradictions can be referred even if no welfare concern.*
Wema treated it as a contemporaneous volunteer note, not a verified quotation from the trainer.
They built a version table and labeled every document by source: council archive, volunteer copy, or public slide. The later annex had no matching council vote.
Zuri began drafting a public correction.
At first she wrote: *The council was deceived.*
Wema asked, “Do we have evidence of intent to deceive?”
Zuri deleted the word.
She replaced it with: *The later annex was not presented to Student Council for approval.*
Stronger, because it was demonstrable.
The council chair arrived angry.
“You are destroying institutional trust.”
Zuri answered, “Trust was damaged when our signature was used to justify a version we never voted on.”
He looked at Wema. “Are you pushing her to do this?”
“The statement is hers.”
“And the decision is mine,” Zuri said.
The volunteers asked whether their names would be announced at the student assembly.
“No,” Wema said, “unless you choose to speak publicly.”
Sheila looked close to tears. “I thought admitting I sent a screenshot would make me the villain.”
“We can investigate individual conduct separately,” Zuri said. “But first we correct the governance failure.”
Wema wrote a distinction into her notes: training failure, individual misconduct, and system design were not the same category.
Zuri posted her correction through the official council account and attached the approval timeline.
That action mattered more than the paper itself. The documents had forced a political choice.
Before they left, Wema inspected the last page of Version C.
The donor logo was prominent.
The approval line beneath it was blank.
No university signature. No Student Council signature. No governance date.
After Zuri posted the correction, the volunteers asked what would happen to them. Wema said the assembly should distinguish between a bad instruction, individual misconduct, and deliberate abuse. Sheila looked relieved and ashamed at once. “I thought admitting I sent one screenshot meant everyone would decide I am the villain.” Zuri answered, “Responsibility still matters. But a system that trained people badly cannot repair itself by feeding one student to a crowd.” That exchange prepared Wema for the next day. She knew the assembly would demand names because names were emotionally satisfying. The harder task would be to keep the public anger focused on rules, mandates, and remedies.
The council called an assembly for the next afternoon.