The Learner

Muhammad Muhsin Ibrahim muhsin2008@gmail.com  @muhsin234 After exchanging greetings, one boy of about 17 to 19-year-old asked me: “You are Mal. Mubarak’s younger brother, huh?” I answered in the affirmative. “Greet him for me”. I said okay and called it a day. Unbeknownst to me, that was only the beginning; he asked me time and again to deliver the same message until one day I got it all enough and warned him off it. The lad is my brother’s student in a college, as he told me. He likely meets with him every day, while I have not seen him for over a year as I have been outside Nigeria since June 2013. Whatever, he doesn’t care; I am his friend on Facebook and the younger (and  junior ) brother of his fave lecturer, hence the right person for his ‘delivery services’. Many others will request you to be friends and then, upon acceptance, leave you a thankful message either on your timeline or inbox. Forget the mostly disquieting English used for the message; I am against lin

Muhammad Muhsin Ibrahim Bayero University, Kano muhsin2008@gmail.com A few other selected students in my college and I were, for the first time, introduced to the Internet as a reward for acing exams of the previous term in 2003. It was a thrilling experience for all of us. I joined Facebook 2 or 3 years after in 2005/2006 when it w as still in its childhood . I had just started tertiary studies then. That was a particular point in my life; I longed so much for education, to learn the English language and to interact with intellectuals. The few popular social networking webs then were Yahoo! Messenger, Meebo , and hi5 . The latter was more a hit, so I patronised it above the rest. Not long after, the star of Facebook shined up, and many people migrated to the latest vogue. I followed the bandwagon. However, I deactivated my Facebook account after a while for mainly two reasons. First, it was steadily withering my commitment to my favourite sites, which I faithfully fanc

Muhammad Muhsin Ibrahim muhsin2008@gmail.com @muhsin234 (Twitter) “It looks foreign”, my Indian friends so often tell me while describing how scenic and highly-developed a particular place is. It happened first while my wife and I were touring the capital, New Delhi last winter. We were entering the subway system called the 'metro' when my friend guiding us said we would feel as if in a foreign country down there. It didn’t dawn on me then until I heard the same expressions time and again from more friends. They obviously forget that everywhere is foreign to me as I am a foreigner , a Nigerian. My country is thousands of miles away. However, each time the incident occurs, it reminds me of a similar preconceived notion of foreign superiority back in Nigeria . In the same vein, Nigerians would quickly brag that their particular possession was made in a foreign country, not in Nigeria ! Pragmatically speaking, the whole concept of “Ƙasar Waje” as we call a foreign c