Mohammed Baba Umar

Student | Aspiring Entrepreneur | Learner | Finance & Investment Enthusiast

[Mohammed Baba Umar @Koyowaa]

"Dear young people,

If you are looking for experience, the right network and access to resources, start with volunteering.

Volunteering puts you in the room where decisions are made. It gives you hands-on experience that builds real skills. It connects you to mentors and opportunities. It opens doors to resources that can fast-track your growth.

It is not just giving your time. It is investing in your future.

Show up. Learn. Build. Grow."

- Tijjani Ahmad

[Peacock @dawisu]

"Health is the greatest possession.
Contentment is the greatest treasure.
Confidence is the greatest friend."

Lao Tzu

[Michael Taiwo @AskMichaelTaiwo]

Most people network up. They chase the person two levels above them.

The real edge is networking sideways. The peer who is just as hungry, just as early, just as unproven as you.

In ten years, one of them will be in a position to change your life. And they will remember who showed up before anyone had to.

[Mohammed Baba Umar @Koyowaa]

"It is tragic that in our understanding of who an investor is on the continent of Africa, we still don't think that fellow Africans are investors." - Plo Lumumba

[Dr. Yakubu Sani Wudil @yakubwudil]

Some of our Professionals who studied—and are currently working—in Russia have indicated interest in sharing their experiences and opportunities available in Russia.

They will be hosted by the Arewa Youth Mentorship Program on Saturday, in sha Allah @ 2 PM.

Are you interested in going to Russia? Indicate in the comment section.

[Mohammed Baba Umar @Koyowaa]

How to navigate "what's your salary expectation" question in interviews

By Chukwunonso Okoro

Salary negotiation is where a lot of good candidates lose value simply because nobody ever taught them how to do it. Here's a practical breakdown:

1. Do your research before you walk in.

Know the market rate for the role, industry, and location by consulting sites like Glassdoor, LinkedIn Salary, and Payscale help, but talking to people already in similar roles is even better. Walking in blind is how people either lowball themselves out of fear or price themselves out of the market from ignorance.

2. Let them name a number first, if you can.

Whoever anchors first sets the frame. If asked "what are your salary expectations?" early, it's fair to redirect by saying "I'd like to understand the full scope of the role first. Can you share the budgeted range?"
If pushed, give a range, not a fixed figure, with your target number near the bottom of your range (not the top). That way you have room to negotiate up.

3. Negotiate value, not desperation.

Don't justify your number with your bills or personal needs. Justify it with what you bring: quantifiable results, scarce skills, certifications, years of specialised experience. Employers pay for value delivered, not need.

4. Silence is a tool.

After you state your number, stop talking. Many candidates undercut themselves by nervously filling silence with justification or an immediate discount. Let the pause sit.

5. Negotiate the whole package, not just base salary.

If the base is fixed, there's often room in signing bonus, remote flexibility, annual leave, professional development budget, or an early review date for a raise.

6. Practice saying the number out loud.

This sounds basic, but confidence in delivery matters as much as the figure itself. A number said with hesitation invites a lower counter but the same number said steadily rarely does.

The goal isn't to "win" against the employer. It's to make sure the offer reflects your true market value, so you start the role respected and fairly paid, not resentful three months in.

©Chukwunonso Okoro.

[Mohammed Baba Umar @Koyowaa]

Few facts about what I knew of late Dr. Umar Sani Bebeji.

1.He was a retired soldier but never boasted about it, and didn't behave like he was a soldier and one will only know through others or one one discussion with him.

2.He was a senior lecturer but didn't behave in that bossy and rigid way the way most lecturer do. He used to personally call his postgraduate supervisees to encourage them to take their research seriously.

3He had a HND from Kadpoly before coming to read law

4.He graduated with a very strong 2:1 ( the 2:1 with security) even though he was involved in almost every student's unionisism at undergraduate level to the extent of clinching the number position of SRC president ABU Zaria and a Principal partner of Attorneys Chambers at the faculty of Law.

5. As lecturer he encouraged and mentored so many students. His counseling, advise and encouragements led so many students to surmount the portholes , dilapidated and challenging roads of a typical public university system in Nigeria.

6.''He had a tough Exterior but a heart of Gold'' From a far someone may think he was stern, rigid and unfriendly. But those of us that knew him as undergraduate students and knew him as a lecture will definitely say otherwise.

7.He was Stern but kind, jovial, approachable, affable, exceptionally intellectual and exceedingly accommodating.

8.He loved his family most especially his parents whom are both alive, his dare wife and children. We all grasped this fact more yesterday when his wife and mother kept seething even though every one tried to soothe them. His Father too couldn't control tears coming down his cheeks.

9.He tried to be fair and balanced in all his engagements on this Blue app. We can all see that from his previous post.

10.He lived with everyone peacefully from what I gathered and personally experienced. Even though as human he might have offended some wittingly or unwillingly. But they say majority carries the day. Majority of the people even on social media, his family, friends, relatives and colleagues say good things about him. THAT IS A SIGN OF GOOD ENDING IN ISLAM.

11.He had a vision changing and transforming the cultural and archaic psyche of the people of northern Nigeria so as to be able to be in tandem with today's challenges and civilization.

12.He excoriated the gullible way in which our youths rely on A.I for everything especially undergraduates and the people of social media. He told me personally that he felt putting too much reliance on A.I will eventually eclipse someones natural abilities.

13.He personally told me that there were some politicians and influential people that tried to pocket him and have some level of control over his social media relevance but he dodged and resisted. Because as he put it, his intellectual traits were not up for sale or grab by politicians or elites that think their money could buy anything and anybody.

14.He was well dressed, stylish, elegant , Neat ,decent,gorgeous and charismatic.

15.He loved the the pale , emaciated and the disgruntled people of Palestine and bemoaned the way the world super powers left them in melancholy. He wanted to see their freedom as most of us do.

May Allah SWT forgive late Dr. Bebeji's shortcomings and grant him Jannatul Firdaus. Amin

Mustapha Ahmad Ibrahim, AICMC.
Late Dr. Bebeji's junior at the faculty of law ABU Zaria and at the Bar. 3D

[Diamonds10 💎 @HarounMuhammed]

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my PhD journey, it’s: the power of ‘not yet’ helps me face problems that once seemed unsolvable, show up consistently with results, and take full accountability during check-in calls with my supervisors—even when things don’t go as planned.

[Mohammed Baba Umar @Koyowaa]

He walked that manual process with me for the better part of a week until the academic office approved it and my results appeared. I have carried a debt to those two men ever since. He was strict where strictness cost you nothing, and generous where generosity cost him his time.

We became friends properly on Facebook, and the friendship never left. We were both fanatic Buharists in those days, defending that government against everybody the sympathisers dismissed as wailers. I jumped the fence first. He stayed, and only came down from the bus after PMB won a second term. But it is not the politics I will remember. It is how well the man could write. I told him many times that writing was his real gift. He could weave words and build an argument you could not walk away from, and he would give you his opinion straight even when he knew it would cost him your peace. We fought over El-Rufa’i’s policies more times than I can count. He mocked me openly, called me naive whenever I raised the possibility of an Igbo presidency or argued for restructuring Nigeria into a true federation. He was hardest on governance and hardest of all on security. When Lt. Col. Mohammed Abu Ali was killed in a Boko Haram ambush and the whole country was raw with anger, he wrote that Buhari had failed even in the one thing he had spent his entire life doing, which was security. Coming from a man who had once defended that government, that line has never left me.

When Facebook suspended my account and I sulked and said I could not begin again, that I could not rebuild that followership from nothing, he refused to let me be. He was stubborn about it. He harassed me until I opened another account, and when Facebook closed that one too, he kept his calm and simply kept calling to check on me.

Whenever he was in Abuja, I was the last person he saw at the end of the day before he retired to his hotel. He was much older than me and he never once made me feel it. We could fight on Facebook in the morning and by afternoon he would call, laughing, and we would spend hours on Nigeria and everything that was wrong with it. We hardly ever talked about ourselves.

Every wedding anniversary I would post his pre wedding pictures with his wife and caption them sakamakon canji, teasing that the reforms had improved his looks. And every time, he gave me the same answer. That it was a lie, that I was only using style to inform his online crushes that the man was married.
There will be no reply this time. There is no morning call coming this afternoon.

They are burying him in Kaduna as I write this. My condolences to his wife and his children and the entire family, to our teachers at the Faculty of Law, and to the Facebook family that read him and argued with him and knew, even while he lived, exactly what they had.

Ya Allah, forgive him, have mercy on him, and make his grave a garden from the gardens of Paradise.
Inna lillahi wa inna ilaihi raji’un.

[Mohammed Baba Umar @Koyowaa]

A TRIBUTE TO MY FRIEND AND LEADER: MALLAM UMAR SANI BEBEJI

Inna lillahi wa inna ilaihi raji’un

By Shettima Danazumi

I woke up around ten this morning and reached for my phone the way I always do, looking for something to laugh about. There is a friend I send every skit and every absurd tweet to, and she sends them back, and that is how our mornings usually begin. I sent her something. I was already waiting for the reply that would make me laugh. What came back was not laughter. She said wait first, did you see the news about this man’s death.

Then she sent a screenshot. A Facebook post. My friend and my leader, Mallam Umar Sani Bebeji, was dead.

I did not believe it. I want to be honest about that, because disbelief is its own kind of prayer. I spoke to him only yesterday. Less than an hour before that screenshot reached me, he had posted a WhatsApp status. A man who is posting cannot be gone. So I called Professor Salim Magashi, the Dean of Law at Ahmadu Bello University and his closest friend, because if anybody could tell me it was a lie, it was him. He did not pick. I called others. And one after another, they took the disbelief from my hands and left me holding the truth. There had been an accident. He did not survive it.

I called him Mallam although he never taught me a single course. He came into the Faculty as a lecturer while some of us were still students, young and full of vibes, still carrying the exuberance of the activist he had been. And because I was almost always somewhere in the middle of whatever controversy the Faculty was boiling over, he noticed me early. Other people looked at me then and saw trouble. Bebeji looked at me and saw himself. He had been President of the Students Representative Council of Ahmadu Bello University, the paramount student body in the institution, the same council where I would later serve as Secretary General. He had been Principal Partner of Attorneys Chambers, which by some quiet coincidence became my own chambers. When he returned to the Faculty as a lecturer, he was made one of the coordinators of the ABU Law Clinic, where I served until I rose to become Director of Litigation before graduation. Wherever I turned, I found his footprints already in the sand. That is why I called him my leader. When any of us was in trouble, he was the one we went to.

In 2015, when Sadiq Samaila was Chief Judge of the SRC Court, we pushed for a road excursion to the University of Ghana, Legon. The management resisted it for a long time, and when they finally relented, they attached a condition. A lecturer from the Faculty had to travel with us. The Dean gave us Bebeji, and I still remember the relief that went round. Of all of them, it was him. That journey was pure laughter from beginning to end. We played games on the road, we ran talkshows in a moving bus, we dragged that man clean out of every comfort he had ever known. He complained about it for the rest of his life. Years later he was still recounting what we did to him on that road, and he was still laughing while he said it. That was his way of telling you that he had loved something.

He was also the last man on earth you wanted to see in an examination hall. He would put me in the front row every single time, where there is no cover and no mercy, and we laughed about it long after I had graduated. But when my final year nearly collapsed over an error on the student portal, when I had written and passed every paper and not one of the courses had been registered for the results to count, it was M K Abdallah who told me to go and see Bebeji. I had already gone to the lecturer I was closest to, the one I had always assumed would help, and been turned away. Bebeji listened for less than a minute. He said this is easy Shettima, let us go to the exam officer. The exam officer was Dr. Salim, his best friend.

[Mohammed Baba Umar @Koyowaa]

@SMosud Upon learning about his dead, you're the first person that came to my mind. May Allah forgive him.

[TheCable @thecableng]

BREAKING: Seplat Energy to sell 10% stake in joint venture to NNPC for $281m

Seplat Energy says it has signed an agreement with the Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC) Limited to sell 10 percent stake in the assets held within the joint venture of NNPC Limited and Seplat Energy Producing Nigeria Unlimited (NNPCL/SEPNU) for $281 million.

Seplat disclosed the details of the transaction in a filing on the Nigerian Exchange (NGX) on Thursday.

https://t.co/sckj8bp0gA

[Mohammed Baba Umar @Koyowaa]

A lady in Kano was reported to have cut her boyfriend's manhood because she suspected him of planning to marry another woman. Wonders shall never end. If she suspected him of cheating on her, why not look for another man instead of committing such a barbaric act that will likely get her into trouble?

[Mohammed Baba Umar @Koyowaa]

Bullying does not have place in our society. We need to refrain from that act. It is reeks of human civilization. Don't ever engage in an act that you don't want it to be happens to you.

[Mohammed Baba Umar @Koyowaa]

Between just 10 years see how the world has transformed.

You either transform yourself or be left behind.

Time waits for no-one. Be very intentional about what will come your way tomorrow.

Be able
Be ready
Be willing

[Mohammed Baba Umar @Koyowaa]

@B_ELRUFAI Honourable idan kuma ta kama sai mu gwabza duk da mu 'yan gabas ne za mu yi volunteer.

[Mohammed Baba Umar @Koyowaa]

Keeping quiet would save you from disappointment and making unavoidable gaffe. Anybody who watched the interview that was granted by Peter Obi on channels will understand that is better for the man to be quiet than to grand the interview. He spew out rubbish and the contents of his speech is shallow, it doesn't carry any weight. It is in fact reveal how weak politically and socially he is.

[Mohammed Baba Umar @Koyowaa]

@AskMichaelTaiwo I was like is this the Oga Mike's account?