Ahamed Rufai Adam

My writing experience thus far has been a blend of passion and profession. I was a campus writer. I wrote articles that bordered on students' walfarism and general campus activities like students politics, roits and romance. At my own expense I made several copies of these articles and pasted on strategically located notice boards within the hostels and across the three different campuses of the university. I signed off my name as A.A.Rufai; a name that rang a bell in the campus community at that time. Though my writing propelled me to a position of fame amongst my contemporaries, I somewhat became akin to an invisible man. This is because many students only knew me by name but not by appearance. So I could be in a barber's saloon taking a haircut while other students there would be arguing for or against an article I have written without realiazing the author is in their midst. This gave me a direct access to have first-hand feedback of my writings. In fact, it was out of the feedback I got one time, when I pasted a short story I then titled, 'Chicken Palaver' that I subsequestly got the idea to develop the one page story into a novella which is today published as The Incredible Cock and accessible on Amazon. I have other publications which evolved over the years from my days as a campus writer while I was an undergraude student at the University of Jos, Nigeria, and now those stories are available to an international audience on online platforms like: www.africanwriter.com. In fact, my undergraduate supervisor, Dr. Deborah Klein, an American lecturer who then taught at the university and who introduced me into the world of creative writing, noticed my passion and suggested I write a story as my final year project. I jumped at the idea and that was how it came to be that I submitted "New Biafa", a short story for my final year project. As a fiction writer I have gone ahead to publish a novel in 2019 titled, THE KUNGA IN OUR FOREST. It gives me so much satisfaction that several thousand copies of this novel has been ordered by Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC,) a government agency responsible for the supervision of lower secondary school and primary school education in Nigeria, and subsequently distributed to selected schools and libraries across Nigeria. For the last 16 years I have been in the employment of the Forestry Research Institute of Nigeria. My writing skils have also made my work as a professional administrative officer much more easier. My interpersonal skills have also been improved upon. Since 2015 I became the maiden chairman of a staff cooperative society in my work place. The cooperative is financially autonomous where the executive, chaired by my humble self, approve non interest loans for the contributing members. My writing and administrative skills came in handy here. I am happy that the membership of the society have grown under my watch from merely 10 registered members to 121. I feel honoured.