Sharaf

25+ years in Finance

[Sharaf @SharafMuhammed]

Note to self:
1. Do not forget to live life.
2. Put family first always.
3. Learn to enjoy little things; they make life worth living.

[Sharaf @SharafMuhammed]

@tosinolaseinde How do we tap into this lovely cake? Please share contact details of the vendor. 🙏🏽

[Sharaf @SharafMuhammed]

@oviosu You see am abi you no see am? 😂😂😂

[Sharaf @SharafMuhammed]

@mrmuazuii @HabuSadeik Public Interest Entities

[Sharaf @SharafMuhammed]

Being expensive doesn’t always equate to value, especially from a functional standpoint. It could satisfy one’s feel good need though, if this is the purpose.

One is not more valuable than the other, they are just different and making comparisons only lead to going down a rabbit hole. It’s like saying that someone that studied bachelor’s in Finance cannot succeed in being a surgeon, if they choose to. People choose different paths for whatever reason.

[Sharaf @SharafMuhammed]

@benawoks Also, both PhD and CFA are designed for different purposes. Does one say that the knife is better than the spoon simply because it can cut through things and the spoon cannot? We need both for different reasons.

[Sharaf @SharafMuhammed]

Your assertion of “will not pass” is clearly incorrect. Anyone that is focused, can persevere and has average intelligence (which I loosely measure by having a bachelor degree as some rigour must be applied to earn it) CAN / WILL pass the CFA exam. It’s just a different kind of rigour. The principles of going through the rigour of PhD or CFA or anything like that is largely the same… whether for academic or professional exam.

Even the CFA Institute only requires minimum entry of bachelor’s degree (from any field) to take the exam.

[Sharaf @SharafMuhammed]

As we embrace the fresh canvas that 2026 offers us, this year offers yet another chance to build on the foundations we've laid through perseverance and insight.

Remember, true progress isn't just in the milestones we achieve, but in the resilience we cultivate along the way. Let's commit to lifting each other up, turning challenges into opportunities, and pursuing excellence with unwavering purpose. Whether you're advancing in your career, nurturing personal development, or inspiring those around you, know that every step forward counts.

Wishing you a year filled with breakthroughs, meaningful connections, and the courage to dream bigger. Here's to making 2026, our most impactful yet!

#NewYear #Motivation #ProfessionalGrowth #Leadership

[Sharaf @SharafMuhammed]

“You don’t write AI, you teach AI” - Jensen Huang

[Sharaf @SharafMuhammed]

@elnathan_john @Hopkins_Review Awesome read! 👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾

This made me smile paragraph to paragraph!

[Sharaf @SharafMuhammed]

@grok @NigeriaStories @grok are the same terms applicable to existing visa holders prior to this announcement?

[Sharaf @SharafMuhammed]

Happy New Year.

May this new year bring you and yours growth, fulfilment, and remarkable achievements.

[Sharaf @SharafMuhammed]

@jeffphilips1 We need him to help us fix the earth, please. We will release him to go to the moon when we can confirm that he has finished fixing planet earth. 😊

[Sharaf @SharafMuhammed]

Merry Christmas 🎄

[Sharaf @SharafMuhammed]

Nice read.

[Elnathan John @elnathan_john]

Last week I published a note about the Hausa word kunya. In preparation for my essay this week, I am posting a little explainer for the Hausa word "karuwa".

One of the words that sits at the centre of the choreography of shame and desire in Hausa language is karuwa.

I grew up hearing it long before I understood its weight. A whisper tossed at a laughing girl. A warning murmured to a daughter. Sometimes a careless insult hurled at a woman whose walk, voice, or clothes unsettled the fragile order of things. In my childhood imagination, karuwa meant one thing: a woman who had crossed an invisible line.

Much later, I learned the word carried a longer and more complicated history, one that reveals more about Hausa moral anxiety than about the women it names.

Karuwa did not begin as a simple synonym for "prostitute", nor did it originally designate a clearly bounded profession. Linguistically, the term appears to have entered Hausa through contact with Kanuri, where karua referred to women living outside the strict architecture of marriage. These were women not formally under the authority of a husband, often economically self-supporting, and socially ambiguous. Some scholars trace the term further back to Arabic roots associated with sexual impropriety, though even there the meaning was never singular or precise.

Early Hausa dictionaries reflect this ambiguity. In Bargery and Abraham, karuwa does not settle neatly on sex work. It stretches. The word is used to describe a harlot, but also a profligate man, a thief, a paramour, even a destitute or socially disreputable person. It functioned less as a professional label than as a moral category: a name for those who lived beyond the sanctioned perimeter of respectability.

Crucially, this category was not always exclusively female.

Over time, however, karuwa narrowed. As Hausa societies became more tightly organised around marriage, lineage, and increasingly reformist moral regimes, the word shed its earlier elasticity and fastened itself almost entirely to women. And not to all women, but to women whose autonomy was visible.

Widows who refused to remarry. Divorced women who did not retreat quietly back into family compounds. Traders, performers, beauty workers. Women who received gifts from lovers. Women who chose where they lived, when they slept, whom they entertained.

Across Kanuri and Hausa societies from Niger through northern Nigeria, there existed recognisable karuwa milieus: women living outside marriage as an alternative life path. Some sold sex. Many did not. What united them was not prostitution, but independence from patriarchal supervision.

This distinction matters.

To translate karuwa simply as sex worker is to miss what made these women threatening. Their danger did not lie primarily in sexual exchange, but in autonomy. They were women whose lives were not fully absorbed by lineage, whose desires were not entirely hidden, whose economic survival did not depend on marriage. As in many societies, autonomy with a female face quickly came to be framed as moral disorder.

The name hardened.

What once described a broad zone of moral ambiguity collapsed into a single accusation. Karuwa ceased to name acts and began to police visibility. It no longer mattered what a woman did. What mattered was that desire could be seen, suspected, or narrated.

Today, to call a woman karuwa is not merely to name one who trades in sex but to injure her socially. A girl who laughs too loudly. A woman who walks without deference. A wife who touches her husband’s hand in public. A student sitting too close to a boy at dusk. Essentially: "an immoral slut". The insult functions like a blade. It cuts at reputation, and in a culture governed by kunya, reputation once torn rarely repairs.

Karuwa punishes not sex, but legibility.

This is where the word connects to everything else I have been researching and writing about in the essay coming this week about 'yan daudu.

In Bori compounds, women later named karuwai, spirit mediums, divorced women, and ’yan daudu often lived side by side. They were not bound by shared identity, but by shared precarity. These were spaces where women whose respectability was already compromised could survive without pretending otherwise. Where gendered labour and erotic ambiguity were folded into the ordinary work of living. Bori did not redeem karuwai. It accommodated them, just like it accommodated 'yan daudu.

As moral language tightened, that accommodation grew fragile.

The narrowing of karuwa preceded the tightening of law. By the time Sharia codes and modern policing arrived, the word was already sharpened. The social imagination had done its work. A category existed. A body could be named.

And yet, buried inside the insult is a fossil of the older meaning: a woman answerable first to herself. An independent woman. Language remembers even when culture pretends not to.

When I hear karuwa now, flung casually in arguments, wielded by elders to discipline younger women, whispered by preachers anxious about desire, I hear centuries layered inside it. Fear of women who wander. Fear of women who choose. Fear of bodies not supervised by lineage, husband, or mosque.

In its deepest register, karuwa is not about trading sex. It is about control.

FOR MORE ON THE EVOLUTION OF THE WORD KARUWA PLEASE READ:

Neil Skinner, A Hausa-Comparative Dictionary (Köln: Rüdiger Köppe, 1996), 139, s.v. “karuwà.”

R. C. Abraham, A Dictionary of the Hausa Language (London: University of London Press, 1962), s.v. “karuwà.”

G. P. Bargery, A Hausa-English Dictionary and English-Hausa Vocabulary (London: Oxford University Press, 1934), s.v. “karuwā; karuwai.”

Joseph McIntyre, “Mobility in the Hausa Language,” Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue canadienne des études africaines 48, no. 1 (2014): 101–17, esp. 110–11.

Lisbet Holtedahl and Mette Bovin, “Karuwai – ‘Free Women’ in Manga (Eastern Niger): The Karuwa Institution, Women’s Alternative to Marriage in Eastern Niger,” Borno Museum Society Newsletter 38–39 (1999): 35–113.

Steven Pierce, “Farmers and ‘Prostitutes’: Twentieth-Century Problems of Female Inheritance in Kano Emirate, Nigeria,” Journal of African History 44, no. 3 (2003): 463–86.

Nina Pawlak, “‘Woman’ and ‘Man’ in Hausa Language and Culture,” Studies of the Department of African Languages and Cultures 45 (2011): 37–52; and Nina Pawlak, “Rodzina w języku i kulturze hausa” [“Family in Hausa Language and Culture”], Etnolingwistyka 33 (2021): 49–68.

Izabela Will, “Cultural Aspects of Nonverbal Code in Hausa,” in Codes and Rituals of Emotions in Asian and African Cultures, ed. Ewa Kaptur-Grygierkiewicz and Anna Kuczyńska (Warsaw: Warsaw University Press, 2009), 163–77.

Mukhtar Ahmad, “An Analytical Study of Paraphrased Sentences in Hausa,” ALSUN Journal of Humanities 4, no. 1 (July 2021): 45–57.

[Sharaf @SharafMuhammed]

Season's Greetings

May this season bring warmth, smiles, and new beginnings 💜

[Sharaf @SharafMuhammed]

Productivity is the missing link to inclusive growth in Nigeria’s 2026 outlook.

Nigeria is likely to record stronger growth by 2026, having absorbed the pain of recent economic reforms.
But growth alone is no longer the goal.

The real question is: who is this growth working for?
Without productivity, growth is rarely inclusive.
Nigeria doesn’t have an effort problem.
People work hard. Businesses hustle.
The issue is that too much effort goes into battling frictions, power, logistics, policy uncertainty, instead of creating value.

When productivity is low:
• prices rise faster than wages
• firms remain small and informal
• credit stays cautious
• poverty reduction stalls
That is not inclusive growth.

Why productivity matters
Productivity is what allows incomes to rise without inflation, small businesses to scale and hire, farmers and traders to earn more from the same effort, and banks to lend safely and confidently. Without it, redistribution becomes the only tool. With it, inclusion becomes sustainable.

What productive inclusion really looks like, It’s not just transfers or safety nets.
It’s higher output per person across the economy:
• reliable power for MSMEs
• efficient ports and roads for fair competition
• stable policies for long-term planning
• skills aligned to real jobs
• a clear path from informality to formality

Why 2026 matters
By 2026, banks will be better capitalised, digital rails deeper, and reforms more mature. This creates a narrow but powerful window to shift from noisy growth to durable, inclusive growth.

The question isn’t how fast Nigeria is growing , it’s how many Nigerians are becoming more productive each year.
That is how wages rise, poverty falls, and opportunity spreads.
Productivity is the engine. Inclusion is the outcome.

[Sharaf @SharafMuhammed]

Quite insightful to understand these cultural underpinnings and how to interact with the world in an informed manner.

I have seen instances where people that are unfamiliar with this concept tend to misinterpret mai kunya as less confident especially in cultures that don’t really have such in their societies especially individualistic societies. It’s more generally understood in communal societies. Very similar to how introversion is equated to shyness, which is also incorrect.

[Elnathan John @elnathan_john]

ON KUNYA:
Kunya is not simply what you feel. It is how you position yourself before feeling becomes necessary. In Hausa culture, the face apologizes before the mouth speaks.

Kunya is not repression. It is choreography.

https://t.co/kncdID8Guz

[Sharaf @SharafMuhammed]

Nothing worthwhile follows a straight line.
Nature proves it daily , rivers bend, trees grow around obstacles, and the sun rises in stages. Progress is designed that way.

* Careers curve
* Growth stretches us
* Skills take time
* ⁠Consistency beats perfection.

So if your journey feels messy right now, relax.

Detours are data, Curves are normal, and forward doesn’t always look straight.

Keep moving. You’re on track.