The Muslim Students’ Society of Nigeria (MSSN) is a unique society that has grown, developed and evolved over the period of 70 years. The society instills unique traits of hard work, dedication, trustworthiness, kindness, humility and selflessness in its members. These traits are taught and inspired rather informally through constant interactions Between the older and younger members at all levels through mentorship. The mentorship system provided by the MSSN is one of its trademarks and unique culture. You hardly go to an MSSN function without a speaker publicly acknowledging the roles of mentors in building their characters in their formative years. Below are the unique mentoring opportunities in MSSN through the lens of my personal experience.
Providing guidance: right from my junior secondary school days, MSSN mentors have always provided guidance where we knew little to nothing. They would waylay us and direct that we go for the regular MSSN meeting during long breaks. They asked us about what we wanted to become in life and listened to us, then they gently gave us their advices and corrected our misconceptions generally. Much later in our lives, these mentors gave us solid advices about how to conduct ourselves in campuses, what we should prioritise and boost our zeal for academic excellence while also developing our capacities by engaging in communal activities.
Molding character: Another salient role of mentors in MSSN was that of moulding our characters. These occurred passively even without the mentors realizing it. These mentors were like a book of life displayed in front of us to read and copy. They demonstrated practically what it meant to be truthful, dedicated, caring, humble, focused, visionary and disciplined. For instance, Mal. Aminudeen Daneji, an elder stateman and former Chairman of MSSN A-Zone would always insist 10 am for 10 am. Meaning, if a meeting or activity is billed to start at a given time, delaying its start by an extra minute is a gross offense to him. So, he taught us practically about respecting time as a valuable resource and its judicious management. The likes of H.E Mallam Ibrahim Shekarau, have mentored us on humility. Despite his loafty achievements in politics, he was very humble and approachable. We had very senior academics and top civil servants who would come to programmes and mingle with participants without any air of authority or affluence. So were welcomed very close to them, and had intricate interactions which were invaluable to us.
Building our potentials: Many of our mentors identified us and our talents early and the potential we potentials we portray. They carefully selected us and trained us, by equipping us with knowledge, skills and subjecting us deliberately to undertake some tasks to develop us in many areas. We owe a lot of gratitude to these mentors whom Allah blessed with foresight to identify and help build our potentials.
Teaching rare soft skills: many of our mentors who identified our potentials and brought us closely taught us some very useful skills that we continue to benefit from in our places of work and life generally. These skills include, taking minutes of meeting, multi-tasking especially when under pressure; organizing an event; crowd control; conceptualizing and planning programmes etc.
Choosing life partners: As we were youth and very full of energy and many fantasies, our mentors never shied away from giving us detailed mentoring on the importance of carefully selecting our spouses and the qualities we should prioritise in making such selections. In fact, some mentors went ahead to suggest suitable candidates as spouses or even pair potentially suitable partners through the MAGACO activities.
In conclusion, the MSSN has grown in the past 70 years as an institution with its unique culture; one of which is mentoring of the younger members by the older members. This unique system has helped produce quality manpower who have excelled in different works of life; and are always grateful to the MSSN for such training.
Shehu Salihu Umar is of MSSN A Zone Hqtrs, Zaria, Kaduna, He can be reached via [email protected]
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