Anybody can become what he dreams to be but there are people who believe that certain persons cannot become somebody in life because of the person’s background and what he does.
Many people think that if you are a Herdsman, your life will end up in the bush, wandering with animals. But it was not so then with young Ahmadu Shehu, who dreamt even in the bush how to become an academic.
But today history has been made as he is an Associate professor of Linguistics at the American University of Nigeria, Yola.
Shehu was a nomad from Adamawa State who braced all odds to become a university lecturer.
He attended a nomadic primary school in his village Mamukan of Jada in Adamawa State.
He was not opportune to proceed to secondary school immediately after he completed his primary education.
It was much later that fortune smiled on him and got selected to participate in a pre-service teacher training program under the UK Department for International Development (DFID).
At the end of that program, he earned the Teachers’ Grade II Certificate which gave him an opportunity to proceed to the Federal College of Education, Yola, for a Nigeria Certificate in Education (NCE).
At the completion of the NCE, he was admitted to the University of Maiduguri where he majored in Linguistics (Fulfulde) earning a First-Class Honours degree.
He was then employed as a Graduate Assistant in the Department of Nigerian Languages, Bayero University Kano.
He later won a scholarship to the University of Malaya, Malaysia, where he earned a Masters’ degree in Linguistics. In 2017, he won two foreign scholarships for a Ph.D. in the United States and Poland.
He chose the latter option because he did not feel comfortable with doctoral programs in the United States whose durations are relatively longer. Ahmadu completed his Ph.D. in a record time of exactly two years on a program of research entitled “Multilingual lexicon of body part terms”, supervised by Professor Iwona Kraska-Szlenk.
During the period of doctoral study, Ahmadu taught linguistics at the University of Warsaw and held two additional study fellowships in Germany.
He was a Research Fellow at the University of Hamburg and the University of Cologne.
Last year, he got invited as a Guest Speaker in the Institute of African Studies at the University of Vienna, Austria.
