Your story isn’t bad. It simply feels like it’s waiting for the right editor, the way a room waits for someone to switch on the light.
Nigeria
Joined December 2014
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Writers are the most enlightened minds you will ever encounter. They are also the most dangerous. We wield articulation like a weapon, dress up our egos in beautiful sentences, and call it wisdom... nairastories.com/audiobooks-…
H.A Musa retweeted
Muslim to Muslim 2.0: Know the kind of Muslim they want you to be.
For you to understand their hostility towards you, you must first know the kind of Muslim they want you to be.
1) They want you to be a cultural mascot whose religion starts and ends with wearing a Jalabiya on Fridays and sharing ram meat during Eid.
2) They want you to be a cowardly intellectual who treats Islamic jurisprudence as an outdated historical artifact instead of a living divine law.
3) They want you to be the type who remains completely mute when your brothers and sisters are being wiped off the map worldwide so you do not upset the global secular order.
4) They want you to be the type who minds your own business when degeneracy is being normalized, so their corruption can spread unchallenged.
5) They want you to be the type who cowers and folds the moment they weaponize the word Taqiyyah to shut down your factual defense of the religion.
6) They want you to be an apologetic reformer who stammers and begs for validation over clear Quranic rulings on morality.
7) They want you to be a modern-day Munafiq who feels more comfortable sitting with those who mock the Prophet (peace be upon him) than with those who defend his Sunnah.
8) They want you to be a privatized believer who keeps your faith locked strictly inside the mosque and never lets it influence your financial or political decisions.
9) They want you to be the desperate validation seeker who is always eager to throw orthodox Muslims under the bus to prove you are one of the acceptable ones.
10) They want you to be the type who compromises the clear-cut modesty laws of the Almighty to sound progressive to a society that is rapidly decaying.
11) They want you to be the type who feels defeated by the current media propaganda and forgets that these global trials are just a setup for the ultimate victory of the believers.
12) They want you to be the type who champions ideologies that the Almighty destroyed entire nations for, just to earn their cheap badge of being "tolerant and inclusive.
I can go on and on. I have studied them enough on this space to know their deceitful tendencies.
The moment you step outside this box and decide to practice authentic Islam, the fake smiles drop and the real battle begins. Stop trying to fit into a mold designed to erase your identity.
Allah knows best.
H.A Musa retweeted
As a Muslim, my loyalty to Allah and my commitment to Islam come before everything else. I love my country, Nigeria, but no nation comes before my Creator. My faith is my foundation.
I have always known this to be true. I remember @ChimezieChika1’s talk about judges’ biases when choosing a winner from a shortlist of writers. Same cloth, different fabric. Art is subjective to a very large degree.
Why STEM Produces More Best-Graduating Students
On why the best-graduating students at our universities have mostly been from STEM courses, I agree with this theory, in part, that science track paraded the best students in our secondary schools, and this spilled over into our universities. The best students, crammed into science, many of them against their will, ended up settling for science courses, and so it’s no surprise that some of them emerge as the best-graduating students in our universities.
I was a science student in secondary school, and even then, there were two classes: A and B. The A-Class was for the super-serious science students. I was in A-Class, and once, after our first-term exams in SS 2, our English teacher kept taunting the arts students with the fact that I, a science student, had obtained the highest grade in English Language. Another time, he asked why I had not considered a career outside science. And I think the fact that I could switch to a social science to study political science and end up graduating top of a class of over 60 students, despite lacking a background in the arts, shows how demanding science is.
But that theory doesn’t fully explain why STEM produces most of the best-graduating students. The grading policies in the arts, humanities and social sciences are overly subjective, and no matter your genius, your grades are subject to your lecturer’s interpretation of your answers. You could argue that a synonym for “beautiful” is “gorgeous”, and the lecturer would mark it wrong and insist that the accurate word is “attractive”, and there’s no planet on which that decision would be reversed. This is not the case in STEM, where 8 + 2 is 10 in Abuja, just as it is in Abidjan, Ankara, Amman, Amsterdam and Atlanta.
The only time I challenged a bad grade in a course, as a political science student, was because the examination was multiple-choice. I had scored 27 in the CA, and I knew the answers to all 70 questions in the examination, so I was shocked to see that I got a 69, which was mathematically impossible. I challenged that grade to the point of writing to the Vice-Chancellor, who asked to have a sit-down with me. Long story short, the lecturer claimed that the Exams and Records Unit had misplaced our scripts. I had to let it go eventually.
I have gone through two different bachelor’s degrees in the social sciences, and what they have in common is the unpredictability of grades, even when you are sure of your answers. You can fill the entire script with the exact answers taught in class and still be apprehensive because your lecturer could simply say the answer is purple, not lilac, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
So, the reason you don’t see many best-graduating students from the arts and humanities isn’t that the students are less intelligent, but that their disciplines are not governed by the same degree of objectivity and standardised assessment as STEM courses. The difference is as much about how academic excellence is measured as it is about the intellectual abilities of the students being measured.
Nostalgia.
“I often think deeply about my friend, who was caught stealing a tuber of yam from my neighbour’s farm. Though I didn’t witness the event firsthand, the eyewitness accounts paint a vivid picture in my mind…”
Read So Much About a Friend by Haliru Musa👇
farafinabooks.com/short-stor…
Such an honour! I am elated to share this story and, perhaps, illuminate the unseen realities of an engineer's working life. If I win the prize, I will use the funds to produce a collection of stories that excavate the hidden world of engrs who manage distribution transformers.
For our Meet the Shortlisted Writer series, we spoke with Haliru Ali Musa @HaliruAliMusa, a Nigerian writer and power engineer whose work explores identity, memory, belief, and the contradictions of contemporary Nigeria.
Read the full interview: elekere.press/meet-haliru-al…
H.A Musa retweeted
Mazeedah Olutosin is an editor and literary critic with a particular interest in children's literature and novels. She works in publishing where she acquires and develops adult and children's manuscripts.
Read More: tinyurl.com/akeguests
#NativeIntelligence #AkeFest26
H.A Musa retweeted
Seeing Sheikh Haifan for the first time. Such a fine Man. May Allah preserve him always and grant his good health.
One thing I love about this Man is simple, he will come, deliver his lecture and move on. He barely deviates from anything outside the lecture.
H.A Musa retweeted
for most young african writers, being shortlisted for the caine prize is a career highlight and a game-changer. i imagine it’s the same for simbarashe. to have this moment yanked from him, to have this level of malice thrown at him is just cruel. i hope he feels protected.
H.A Musa retweeted
Dear Lagosians, This is my promise to you.
I will never in any language tell you to live in your parents house as an answer to the expensive rents and housing deficit.
Instead we will work tirelessly to deliver a 100,000 units of housing that are not only accessible but truly affordable.
Enact laws that protect tenants and create an agency to investigate and enforce said laws.
I will never in any language tell you that Traffic is a lifestyle.
Instead we will deliver the entire rail network in 2years by opening the project to private sector procurement. Our focus will not be how to pad or steal money it would be on making movement in lagos more effective and affordable.
I will never in any language tell you that we do not know or understand how much waste is being generated in Lagos state, neither will we tell you to go back to you village when you complain about the state of the enviroment .
We will rid the waste management system of the corruption and racketeering that has left lagos covered in filth. We will create a waste to energy and waste to wealth value chain. We will build out proper sewage processing facilities and empower local governments to participate in waste management.
Lastly under no circumstance will any public official boast about expensive watches whilst so many struggle in poverty.
My promise to you is high impact governance, actions you will feel, because Actions speak far louder than words.
#ourlagos.
Here is a quick look at Gbadebo Rhodes-Vivour taking direct questions from Gen Z Lagosians at #ThePlatformNG Town Hall Meeting today.
What are your thoughts on his roadmap for Lagos? Let us know in the comments below! 👇
#ThePlatformNG #LagosTownhall #GRV #GenZ #NationBuilding
H.A Musa retweeted
BREAKING:
Hussani Abdulrahim is a Nigerian writer. He has a degree in Pure Chemistry from Usmanu Danfodiyo University, Sokoto. Hussani was shortlisted for the 2026 Bristol Short Story Prize, the Masters Review 2026 Winter Short Story Award for New Writers,
Alhamdulillah.
I wrote only two short stories this year. Just two. 😅
I have been focusing more on writing longer works, so I really didn’t expect one of those two stories to get me shortlisted for this prize.
But here we are. 😅
This means a lot to me, especially because of how
H.A Musa retweeted
Who told you one cannot use his legs to measure a distance on a site? This is a standard surveying technique called pacing.
In civil engineering and site reconnaissance, pacing is a recognized way to get a quick estimate of distance. Every experienced field engineer knows their average stride length. You walk the alignment, count your steps, and multiply by your pace factor to get the rough dimensions.
It is not meant for final structural models or detailed design, but it is perfect for on-the-spot field assessments. You do not need to pull out a measuring tape just to get a preliminary feel of the road width or drainage length.
Many of you just laugh at things you do not comprehend.
H.A Musa retweeted
Some prominent examples of the now dreaded Not X But Y:
Charles Dickens, The Great Expectations: "It was not because I was faithful, but because Joe was faithful."
Sahih Bukhari 6114: “The strong is not the one who overcomes the people by his strength, but the strong is the one who controls himself while in anger.”
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness: “It was not my strength that wanted nursing, it was my imagination that wanted soothing.”
Hosea 6:6: "For I desired mercy, not sacrifice."
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale: “I avoid looking down at my body, not so much because it’s shameful or immodest but because I don’t want to see it.”
James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room: “But it was not the room’s disorder which was frightening; it was the fact that when one began searching for the key to this disorder, one realized that it was not to be found in the usual places.”
And my favourite:
Matthew 4:4: “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”
I think intelligence is something you demonstrate rather than something you simply have. It is like being a poet. Being a poet means very little as a static identity. You are a poet every time you go to the page and something happens. That happening is intelligence in action.
