Darkness at Noon: Prof. Muhtar Hanif Alhassan (1954-2024)
By Prof. Abdalla Uba Adamu
It was with heavy heart that I took a phone call that informed me of the passing away of my bosom friend, Prof. Muhtar Hanif Alhassan in a hospital in Cairo on Thursday March 21, 2024. I have been aware of his illness. I and Salisu Ɗanyaro have been monitoring his unfortunately deteriorating health. In the end, the sun sets at noon for an incredibly bright, brilliant, super intelligent unassuming quite genius from Kano, northern Nigeria.
I first met Muhtar in June 1993. He had returned from Sussex University, Brighton, UK after his doctoral studies in 1992, and people kept saying we should meet as we had so much in common—but of course he was much much brighter than I was, or would ever be. Although I also attended the same university, I had finished my PhD (or DPhil as they prefer to name their doctorates) in 1988, so we missed each other, as he came to Sussex a couple of years after I had left.
Our interface was computing. In early 1990s computer technology was making heavy inroads in Kano. Business Centers were being set up. The pioneers were Abacus Computers (Adamu Sufi), City Business Center (Abba Lawan Daneji) and Midtown Business Center (Faruk Ɗalhatu).
Having spent a year at the University of California as a Fulbright Senior African Research Scholar at UC Berkeley, from 1991 to 1992, I came back from the US heavily loaded with a vast amount of shrink-wrapped original software costing thousands of dollars, and a lot of Shareware software (try-before-you buy) on dozens of 5.25 floppies. This gave me a a high vantage position in software useability stakes in Kano and I became the main supplier of software to all and sundry—even establishing my own ‘company’, Tangerine Dream Computer Services.
Despite hungrily devouring dozens of magazines available on computing in those days (PC Plus, PC Magazine, Computer Shopper, PC World, etc.) sold by a cantankerous Lebanese lady, Nadia, in a corner shop near Beirut Road mosque in Kano, I was not a hardware expert. A colleague at Bayero said I should meet Muhtar whom I don’t know, but whom I was told was a genius. We met after Friday prayers one day in June 1993 in BUK. We formed a lifelong partnership. I can proudly proclaim that Muhtar taught me a lot about computers, programming languages and software useability.
Born in Galadanci, Kano city in September 1954, Muhtar was named so by his father, a Qur’anic teacher, at the advice of the father’s friend. Years later, as he related the story to me, he said decided to add ‘Hanif’ to his name officially, thus becoming Muhtar Hanif Alhassan.
He attended Gwarzo Boarding Primary School, a unique experimental primary school in Kano of the period. He finished in 1968, making us contemporaries (although he was a couple of years older than me). His excellence in leaving school certificate examinations earned him a place at Federal Government College Warri, Delta State from 1969 to 1973, one of the first Kano indigenes to have such opportunity. He graduated with distinction. Towards the tail end of his secondary schooling, he applied for a Russian (then as Soviet Union) scholarship. While waiting for the outcome, he was admitted at the School of Basic Studies, Ahmadu Bello University Zaria, the breeding ground of northern Nigerian intellectuals and technocrats where he reconnected with many former Gwarzo Boarding friends such as AbdulRazzaq Ahmad Muhammad-Oumar and Bashir Sa’idu, forming a trio of highly motivated intellectual young people.
His application to Russia was successful and he was awarded the Foreign Aid scholarship purely on merit. He was placed at the Kyiv State University, Kyiv, Ukraine from August 1974 to September 1975 where he obtained A levels with distinction in Maths, Physics and Chemistry. This merged with his undergraduate studies for two years. His excellent results earned him admission in August 1977 to a Masters degree at the Belarus National Technical University, Minsk, in Electric Drives and Automation with specialization in Industrial Automation. He graduated with very good grades in 1982. Up to his passing away, Muhtar could speak passable conversational Russian.
On his return to Kano after eight years in Russia in 1982, he served his National Service at the Nigerian Mining Corporation, Jos, where he was absorbed after the service year. On a visit to Kano, the late Prof. M.K.M. Galadanci grabbed Muhtar by the hand and took him straight to the Faculty of Technology, Bayero University Kano and introduced him to the Head, Department of Electrical Engineering, then Abubakar Sani Sambo. Abubakar and Muhtar were classmates at SBS. They were both geniuses. Muhtar was immediately employed as an Assistant Lecturer in the Department. In 1989 he was a beneficiary of the last remnants of Kano State government’s scholarship generosity in the era and he was fully sponsored for a DPhil program at Sussex University. Many BUK staff attended the university, including Abubakar Sani Sambo himself. Muhtar finished in his DPhil in 1982, specializing in Control Systems with focus on – Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motors in Position.
Muhtar’s brilliance in computing, robotics and early Artificial Intelligence even in the crude years of the 1980s were clear enough to make Bayero University Kano appoint him the first Director Management Information Systems (MIS) to automate the decision making process in the university from 1993 to 1995.
He was in this position until he was hijacked by Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University (ATBU) Bauchi in 1996 where he was appointed Director MIS and Deputy Director Computing Services and Senior Lecturer in Engineering and Computer Science. While there, he led a team of IT Professionals responsible for establishment of a robust information system for the University. This was solid enough to make Inland Bank Nigeria Plc engage him to automate their operations—becoming one of the first few Nigerian banks to do so in the late 1990s.
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In 2004 he was literally hijacked by the then Registrar-General of the Corporate Affairs Commission, Ahmed Almustapha who had just been appointed the RG of CAC, and wanted the best to automate the Corporation. He knew of Muhtar and lost no time in bulldozing Muhtar to transfer his services to CAC. Muhtar served as Director ICT (Information Management System) CAC for seven years, leaving in 2011. While at CAC he led that team that transformed the Commission’s processes from manual to Web based transactions using electronic workflows over a rugged intranet that spans the 36 states of Nigeria. CAC is still benefitting from this innovation.
He went back to academia, this time to Nile University in 2011 becoming the Head of Electronics Engineering Department, and later, the Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Administration). In 2013, he was, once more, headhunted, this time by Prof. Vincent Ado Tenebe, a former colleague of his at ATBU and then the Vice-Chancellor of the National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN). Prof. Tenebe employed Muhtar on December 11, 2013 as a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Computer Sciences in the then School of Science and Technology. He was posted as the Director, NOUN Special Study Centre, Public Service Institute of Nigeria.
However, at Nile University he was due for promotion to Associate Professor, and the University had sent his papers for assessment. The result came back positive and he was duly promoted Associate Professor of Computer science with effect from March 2, 2015, even after had left the university. NOUN therefore merely endorsed this position in January 2016 through another set of positive assessments.
I was appointed the Vice-Chancellor, National Open University of Nigeria in February 2016. When I reported, I was hugely relieved to see that Muhtar was already a staff in the university. Right there and then, I felt more than half of my job would be easy. On taking over, I met a chorus of protests from students about missing results, miscalculation of results, website glitches, etc. The MIS system of NOUN at the time was outsourced to external contractors.
After studying the situation for over three months, I created a brand new Directorate of Management Information Systems (DMIS) and made Muhtar the Director. I gave him only one task: bring back our data. No more outsourcing. And no limit to resources. These were two things Muhtar wanted to truly excel: resources and targets.
And he did deliver. By 2017, and despite howls of protests both from within the university and from the companies feeding fat on NOUN’s huge number of students, Muhtar had come up with a robust MIS system, NOUN Portal StudWare, that withstood a series of hacks.
Within two years, we had cleared all student results backlogs, created an effective internal monitoring mechanism and dispensed with the contractors who were charging the university billions to run a system a dedicated team of just five people could. But then, Muhtar was equivalent to more than 10 people when it comes to coding. It was difficult to see how he could fail, with the following specialties in his belt: Computer-aided analysis of magnetic fields, object-oriented programming solutions to engineering problems, data-driven applications, web based data communications (xml, etc.), Design and simulation of control systems, Computer control, embedded systems, mobile technology, m-business solutions, microcontrollers and microprocessors, near-field communication, digital signal processing, Artificial Intelligence and GIS technology.
Based on his numerous publications and designs (web pages, software applications etc.), NOUN promoted him to Professor of Computer Science in 2021. Yet, once more, he was hijacked by Al-Muhibbah Open University (AOU), Abuja in 2023, leaving NOUN on a leave of absence. As Allah willed it, his stay at AOU was brief before he was afflicted with illness. He was eventually rushed to Cairo for advanced treatment. His situation deteriorated, and on Thursday March 21, 2024, Prof. Muhtar Hanif Alhassan returned to Allah (SWT).
Quiet, unassuming, gentle, but with a laser-sharp brain, Muhtar was not only able to sort computer problems, but also willing to teach others – and in this, he found a willing student in me. We forged a life-long partnership. While I dealt with the marketing of our talents, with focus on software, Muhtar was the ‘engineering’ division, dealing with hardware. We formed a fair of early computer educators in Kano.
Our initial partnership was catalytic in introducing quite a few innovations in Kano computer circles. The main one was the development of a Hausa-language word processor. Muhtar had developed a prototype while on his D.Phil. program at Sussex as a personal side project, and which he named Marubuciya/the writer, giving it a feminine name that would delight feminists. He sought my input on its useability. I then requested Muhtar Yusuf (with the nickname of ‘Banana’ due to his curved shots in playing soccer which he was good at when younger) from the Department of Nigerian Languages with specialization in Linguistics. The three of us started a critical analysis of the word processor – Muhtar was coding, I was testing while Muhtar Banana was proof-reading it from linguistic perspectives. The project started in my living room in campus housing on Sunday November 21, 1993.
The process was a fascinating exercise in translation, as the team wanted a word processor where Hausa typists would easily understand the menus. The team relied on Muhtar Yusuf for input into appropriate equivalency to use. Expressions such as ‘okay’, ‘underline’, ‘italic’, ‘bold’, proved particularly problematic to translate in Hausa as single words, without creating hyphenated equivalents. This would not only be awkward in the spaces provided for coding such expressions, but can become confusing to neophyte computer users when convoluted translations were involved. Without any interest from the university, or any sustainable funding from outside sources, the Marubuciya development team became stuck with a prototype.
I then decided to reach out to City Business Center in the city of Kano to test the prototype. Surprisingly, the operators indicated that they were quite comfortable with the Microsoft Word menu structures and do not wish to learn all over again on another word processor. However, their main challenge was lack of a TrueType font that will capture Hausa language glottal consonants (Ɗ, ɗ, Ƙ, ƙ, Ɓ, ɓ). These were not found on any computer keyboard. That gave me a new assignment – to create the Hausa ‘hooked’ fonts. That was the beginning of the development of ‘rabiat’ and ‘abdalla’ Hausa fonts.
Prof. Muhtar Hanif Alhassan was a genius, pure and simple. He was not loud, he was shy, with a hidden sense of humor (and full of Russian jokes). Unobtrusive, Modest. Team player. May Allah (SWT), forgive him, receive him in His Rahama and grant him eternal rest.
Prof. Abdalla Uba Adamu is former Vice Chancellor National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN)
